In his forthcoming book, The King Jesus Gospel, Scot McKnight relays an experience from his youth in the program Evangelism Explosion.  Doing door-to-door evangelism, he and his program mentor far over-stayed their welcome in a person’s home who finally broke down and “received Christ.”  It seems that he did so, however, just to get his […]

This very striking story ran in our city newspaper yesterday.  I love hearing accounts of forgiveness so I tore it out to discuss around the dinner table tonight.  True stories and good stories often resist simplistic “lessons,” but here are some scattered observations: Forgiveness is so profoundly powerful and beautiful.  I find that people of all […]

I wrote a few posts on the gospel last week and had kept things pretty general.  I didn’t make plain my real targets because I’m still finding my feet in this blogging medium.  I’m slightly hesitant to develop a negative tone, and the “hyperventilating religious invective-slinging blog” category seems fairly well-covered. At the same time […]

*Given at Midtown Christian Community, Sept. 16, 2006* Isaiah 50:4-9 James 2:1-5,8-10,14-18 Mark 8:27-38 Psalm 116 When we read the stories of the Bible that involve good and bad characters, we pretty much always associate ourselves with the good characters.  It’s easy to do this, since, even if we have a fairly low image of […]

One of my favorite U2 songs is “The Wanderer.”  It’s not too well-known outside of U2 fan-dom, but it’s brilliant in so many ways and on so many levels.  It is the final song on the Zooropa album, released in the midst of U2’s highly experimental phase during which, according to Christian Scharen, the band […]

I’ve been thinking lately about the bigness, richness, and deepness of the gospel—its profundity and capacity to meet any and every moment.  Sometimes the gospel talks about forgiveness and sometimes community transformation.  Sometimes it rebukes and sometimes it comforts.  God transformed history’s darkest  and most unjust moment into the birth of the new world in […]

I wrote yesterday that the gospel speaks a variety of voices.  The reality of what God has done in Christ and by the Spirit is so large and high and deep and wide that it isn’t captured by any singular formula.  The gospel is always meeting and transforming every situation it encounters—always devastating and renewing, […]

Because the gospel is talk about what God has done in Christ, it must be multi-faceted, diverse, and versatile.  The gospel speaks with many voices.  That’s not to say that there are different gospels or that there are different “takes” on the gospel that are mutually contradictory.  Nothing like that at all. I mean that […]