This past weekend I had the privilege of preaching, and I felt led to preach on a topic that God was working on in my own life: anger. I’m used to being pretty transparent with my flaws, but this is one I actually feel pretty self-conscious about. Feeling “irritated” or “impatient” is a more polite way to describe it. We can all relate to that. That’s still respectable. But if someone says they have an anger problem, something immediately feels unsafe. We instinctively associate it with violence. I don’t think of myself as a violent person, but when anger starts affecting your actions, that’s the general direction, isn’t it? It’s…

I had planned to write something else next, but I was struck by a thought this morning and wanted to take this opportunity to meditate on it. And since decisions of sequence are currently arbitrary, I don’t feel bad in the least. The spark happened on social media as one friend commented on another friend’s post. (If you’re ever wondering what social media is good for, this surely belongs on your list.) This commenter spoke in praise of mystery over and against claims of knowledge, and spoke as one trying to swing the pendulum back from the extreme in which we often find ourselves. I don’t wish to recap his…

In my last post, I described how I ended up prioritizing a doctrinal statement and why I’m beginning with church history rather than Scripture to build one. I want to flesh out these thoughts a bit more. If the Bible is my authority (which it is), then everything I do should be in submission to that book. I believe it is completely true. Why? For the same reason I believe it’s authoritative: I believe God wrote it. No, I don’t mean God’s disembodied hand appeared and took up a pen. I believe He worked through people to produce His words, faithfully. The ancients had a metaphor that I like: it…

I’m good at overcomplicating things, and part of the reason is I like to leverage actions for multiple outcomes. A sort of economy of intellectual motion. This tends to multiply the variables that affect my decisions, and that in turn requires more recalculating along the way. Admitting it is supposed to be the first step. I’ll get back to you about the others. I’ve decided to leave the question about audience for a little while and focus on what’s next for me. I’ll work on myself in public and hope that produces something worth sharing. My first real moment of clarity on this was during the sermon on Sunday morning,…

I’ve been in the church for my whole life, and I’ve been involved in ministry for most of that time. There are many, many questions that interest me, but a few that I keep coming back to time and again. Chief among them are these: What does it mean to live in submission to the Bible, to respect the authority of an ancient text? Why is good Christian leadership so hard to come by, especially in a world saturated with leadership resources? The first question can lead to an endless set of objections about reason, interpretation, realism, tradition, culture, etc., etc. I have looked into all of these, and while…