Hi Friends! I haven’t sent out a ministry update since early September and—WOW—a lot has happened since then! Here’s our latest: Care Net: As most of you know, in my full-time day job, I’m the Executive Director of Church Outreach & Engagement for Care Net, an umbrella organization that serves 1200 pregnancy centers across the United States and Canada. In … Read More
Difficult People and God’s Surprises
“As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and us, crying out, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.” And this she kept doing for … Read More
Uncertainty and God’s Will
I’ll never forget the time our youth pastor’s wife came up to me after the Sunday morning service and said, “Pastor Greg, can you help us? We don’t know what the h*ll we’re doing!” She was referring to the profound uncertainly she and her husband both felt over what God wanted them to do vocationally and where he wanted them … Read More
What I Learned about God from James Bond, 2 of 2
Buried in the recesses of our soul is a quiet desperation for adventure, a hunger for more than our current experience. James Bond speaks to that “wild at heart” part of us and stirs and soothes those fantasies. Are those fantasies all bad? All things we need to eradicate or repress? Or are they mixed with the image-of-God stardust we … Read More
What I Learned about God from James Bond, 1 of 2
It may seem counterintuitive, I know, and they say “don’t miss the forest for the trees,” but I’d like you to look at a particular tree with me… in order to see the forest… with the end goal of better seeing the Maker of that forest. To be clearer, I’d like to start with a popular fantasy, a movie franchise … Read More
What I Learned About Marriage from Kay Hymowitz
Most Christians believe deeply in marriage and see it as the foundational institution of the human race (Gen. 2:18), but many have never thought about what it does for society. For me, the most insightful book I’ve read to date on this is Marriage and Caste in America by Kay S. Hymowitz. Hymowitz is an incisive American author and senior … Read More
Thinking About Fire
“All candles are lighted by his torch.” Thomas Manton “We didn’t start the fire It was always burning, since the world’s been turning We didn’t start the fire No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it” Billy Joel “Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by … Read More
Nuclear Family, 2 of 2
What of Jamie Smith’s critique from Part 1 that many nuclear families are “closed, self-sufficient, autonomous” units with little concern for others, including a church or spiritual family? He’s right but the reasons for this are myriad and complex and certainly not an indictment of the traditional family itself. Further, being self-sufficient isn’t always bad. Paul tells us to “bear … Read More
Nuclear Family, 1 of 2
“If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families… worse for children.” -David Brooks https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/ Although David Brooks and I don’t share the same view of God’s design for family or the superiority of the “chosen families” … Read More
Breaking Free of Rigid Family Stereotypes
I’ve written about this more extensively here but the cultural stereotypes of dad as breadwinner or provider and mom as nurturer (think Leave it to Beaver) go back to 1760 and the Industrial Revolution, not 1950. Further, these rigid stereotypes are cultural, not biblical. As we pointed out here, even in the ancient Near East, the Proverbs 31 woman worked … Read More