Were there any particularly transformative moments for you while listening?

I think that, first of all, the depth of Scripture and theology was amazing. There were times that I would stop and say, “Boy, this church had decades of teaching at this level.” This immersion just comes up in his preaching all the time. He gets the big picture.

He sees how things go together at a level of depth that you would go, “That’s not profound.” But the profoundness is that he puts the pieces together. There was a sense that he wasn’t preaching at but … was standing alongside and that we are together learning under the authority of Scripture.

In one sermon, he said, “I think the great difficulty any Christian communicator or preacher has today is to have the courage to face the applications of Scripture in their own lives.” He applied Scripture to himself before he came to anyone else.

Then, in another sermon, he talks about the hallmark of authentic evangelicalism. And I’d be curious to know how John would deal with that today, given what’s happened to the term. But back then, it was the high view of Scripture and Scripture being applied to the realities of the current world.

He would say, “The hallmark of authentic evangelicalism is not that we maintain the traditions of the evangelical elders. It is rather that we are prepared to reexamine even the most long-standing evangelical traditions in the light of Scripture, in order to allow Scripture, if necessary, to judge and reform our traditions. Evangelical traditions are not infallible; they need to be reexamined. They need to be judged. They need to be reformed.” Well, that’s a statement that I think rings true today.

Read it all.

John Stott: ‘Evangelical Traditions Are Not Infallible’

The late theologian’s sermons are going digital, thanks to one of his family friends.

The public will soon have access to a digital collection of hundreds of John Stott’s recorded sermons and transcripts spanning five… pic.twitter.com/O6j2id2afC

— Lagrimas DeMadonna (@lagrimasshop) March 14, 2023

Last June, Keller participated in an inpatient immunotherapy trial at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, which he said had “shown great promise in potentially curing cancer.” The 72-year-old is returning to the Bethesda, Maryland, facility next month to do another variation of that immunotherapy on new tumors.

The tumors “are unfortunately in some fairly inconvenient places,” Keller said, “so the doctors encouraged us to go through the treatment again, this time targeting a different genetic marker of the cancer.”

“It was brutal last June, so we approach this with an awareness of how much prayer we need,” Keller wrote on Twitter. “Please pray for our trust and dependence on God, for his providential oversight of the medical preparations now in process, and for our desire to glorify God in whatever comes our way. Thank You.”

Read it all.

“Please pray for our trust and dependence on God, for his providential oversight of the medical preparations now in process, and for our desire to glorify God in whatever comes our way.”https://t.co/xhlyOxhdvA

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) March 13, 2023

In March 2021, I made public my departure from the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination I’d loved all my life and served since I was 12.

When we entered the foyer, the double doors to the sanctuary were 20 feet ahead of us and wide open. We were looking to slip subtly into a pew, but a whole handful of people were huddled at the door. A man around our age with a gentle face and warm, genuine smile was among them. He had on a white robe overlaid with a green stole bearing a grapevine pattern. He reached out his hand to me and, in a louder whisper, introduced himself as the rector. “Welcome to our church. And you are?”

“Beth—” I hesitated for half a second—“Moore.”

“Oh!” he said, tilting his head back with surprise and an infectious, harmless chuckle. “Like Beth Moore.”

“Unfortunately, yes.” The verger who’d worked with him for decades would inform me later with a wide grin that the rector was simply amused I had the same name as the infamous Beth Moore. Nothing further occurred to him.

“Come right on in,” he said in the dearest way. “We’re glad to have you.”

Somewhere around 120 people were seated in the pews of the sanctuary. We’d hardly sat down when a bell rang….

Read it all.

I love imagining @BethMooreLPM introducing herself to a rector who's familiar enough to say "like Beth Moore!" but not enough to know it's her https://t.co/CxAuG7UhOJ

— kate shellnutt (@kateshellnutt) March 6, 2023

When Tim Keller arrived in New York City in 1989 to plant Redeemer Presbyterian Church, about 30 percent of Manhattan residents claimed no religion.

In 2023, about 26 percent of people in Indiana identify with no particular religion. The numbers are around the same or higher in states across the US—Nevada and New York, Colorado and Wisconsin.

The country’s disaffiliation and apathy to faith underscores the urgent need for cultural apologetics, according to Collin Hansen, editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and executive director of its new initiative named for TGC cofounder Tim Keller.

The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, which launched last week, isn’t out to replicate the 72-year-old pastor but to equip leaders to also think deeply about how to present the gospel to the post-Christian context they find themselves in.

“This is not about teaching everyone to think what Tim Keller thinks, but this is about helping people to think the way he learned to think about his culture and applying that to our own day,” said Hansen.

Read it all.

CT spoke with executive director @collinhansen about moral credibility in apologetics and how the new Keller Center can strengthen the witness of the church.https://t.co/YKfZEnOi3F

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) February 15, 2023

From there:

The decision of the General Synod to support the bishops of the Church of England in their intention to make provision for blessings for couples in same-sex relationships represents a shocking departure from the teaching of God’s Word, which will have serious and distressing repercussions.

I should stress that there is no disagreement about the great dignity of all people, made in God’s image and deeply loved by him. We all affirm the importance of welcoming everyone to our churches, whatever their sexuality or relational circumstances. The division is about sex and marriage. The Bible’s teaching is clear, as taught by the universal church down the ages, that God intended his good gift of sex to be reserved for the marriage of a man and a woman (see my recent publication Together in Love and Faith? for more detailed teaching on this and related matters).

By offering the prayers they have published, the bishops will be giving authority (to those clergy who wish to use them), to bless in God’s name behaviour which the Bible calls sin. This is a very grievous step to take, which will cause serious spiritual damage and result in deep division within the Church of England and wider Anglican Communion.

Although the blessings will only be formally commended after the bishops publish further guidance in the summer about the context in which they can be used, the direction of travel is clear. In our distress, and perhaps confusion, we should remember that Christ is lovingly sovereign over his church and his purposes will prevail. We should also be encouraged by the principled, robust and united opposition to these proposals from over 40% of the Houses of Clergy and Laity in Synod, as well as a handful of bishops. That is a significant grouping which, in fellowship with the great majority of global Anglicans, alongside faithful Christians of all traditions and denominations, is determined to continue to walk together in obedience to Christ, as we seek to bear witness to him in our lost and needy world. We cannot, however, travel with those who are leading people away from God’s ways.

St Ebbe’s clergy have already declared that we are in impaired communion with the bishops in our diocese, which means that we will not welcome them to preach, confirm, ordain or conduct our ministerial reviews, and we will not take communion with them. The PCC has also taken action to ensure that any money we pay within the diocese is distributed via the Oxford Good Stewards Trust and is only used for faithful gospel ministry and essential administrative costs. We will be working closely with others, especially within the Church of England Evangelical Council, to discuss what other actions we can take, either individually as churches or together, both to distance ourselves from false teaching and to promote the cause of the gospel. As a larger church, we are especially conscious of our responsibility to help and support smaller evangelical churches, as well as faithful clergy and laity who are in the especially vulnerable situation of serving in churches where their congregations are divided or against them on these issues.

The debate within Synod, and the decision it made, bear witness to a division which goes far deeper than that over the particular presenting issue. There are now two distinct groups within the Church of England. One has chosen the way of compromise with the world and disobedience to God’s word; the other is determined to stay faithful to Christ, whatever the cost. It has been very encouraging to see deepening bonds growing between orthodox Anglicans, from different evangelical and other orthodox ‘tribes’. In the months, and no doubt years, ahead we will be seeking to build new structures that will, God willing, enable us to maintain distance from those who have gone down the wrong path, while working together with orthodox Anglicans in the cause of the gospel.

There will be significant challenges ahead, as we are forced to distance ourselves from many within the Church of England, while being faced with bemusement and, no doubt hostility, from the watching world. Perhaps most painfully, we will have to face differences amongst friends about how to respond to these realities. Our consciences and contexts differ. For myself, along with very many others, I am determined to stay to contend for truth and bear witness to Christ within the Church of England, and believe we can do so with integrity, certainly at this time and for the foreseeable future. Others, for varying reasons, whether principled, pragmatic or both, will choose a different path. Let us determine to resist the devil in his attempts to divide us and keep looking to our loving God. We are in desperate need of his mercy, because of our many sins, his wisdom in our perplexity and his strength in our weakness.

'Until now our doctrine has been clear… Let us be in no doubt whatsoever that that is a very serious step to take…

This is just the first step, massive as it is… it will continue & the cost will be enormous'

Vaughan Roberts @synod #synod #synod2023 #LLF pic.twitter.com/maViNig0Kx

— Rebecca (Bex) Chapman (@bexchapman3boys) February 8, 2023

From there:

We are deeply saddened and profoundly grieved that General Synod has given a ‘green light’ to the proposals put forward by the House of Bishops. The Church of England now appears set on a course of action that rejects our historic and biblical understanding of sex and marriage, by departing from the apostolic faith we are called to uphold. This decision will be extremely distressing for evangelicals in this country today, as they consider the impact of the decision on their ministry and as they continue to contend for Jesus in their local contexts.

This seems to us to be a lose-lose position for everyone in the Church of England. Those who wanted more change will continue to ask and push for greater change. Those of us who have been trying to uphold the historic and biblical understanding of marriage and singleness say change has gone too far. This decision has settled nothing and has only served to deepen divisions and cause deeper hurt.

We will continue to work alongside evangelicals across the country, who today share our sense of great sadness and dismay, to contend for biblical faithfulness and to live lives that Jesus has called us to. We are grateful that several speakers noted the need for some kind of settlement, though this would need to be without theological compromise. We believe that putting in place new imaginative structures, ‘good differentiation’, is the only way we are going to be able to reach a settled outcome, that maintains the highest degree of unity possible within the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.

The real point of all this is that the Church of England is now to bless same-sex unions in clear defiance of both the Bible and the tradition of the Christian church. It will do so even as many of the more conservative churches in the Anglican Communion threaten to break from Canterbury. It will do so even as those identified as LGBTQIA+ in the bishops’ statement are outraged that the church is so tepid. It will do so even after evangelicals rightly call the move outright rebellion against the Word of God.

Anglicans pride themselves on their traditional via media, or way between. They were born in an effort, at least by some, to find a third way between Protestantism and Catholicism. They are proud of their supposed openness to both believers who hold to historic Christian doctrines and heretics who deny them. Now that the sexual revolutionaries are in control of the society and ready to bare their teeth against any who resist, the bishops of the Church of England reveal themselves to be toothless tigers who hold to an imaginary third way between biblical Christianity and the ideologues of the sexual and gender revolutions.

In the Book of Common Prayer’s rite for the consecration of a bishop, the candidate is required to pledge fidelity to the Bible. Then they are asked this: “Will you then faithfully exercise yourself in the same Holy Scriptures, and call upon God by prayer, for the true understanding of the same; so as ye may be able by them to teach and exhort with wholesome doctrine, and to withstand and convince the gainsayers?”

Now, the bishops of the Church of England are the gainsayers. If you bless same-sex unions, you are buying the entire package demanded by the moral revolutionaries. This isn’t a third way. This is just old-fashioned surrender. You bless same-sex unions, dear bishops, and you just bought them.

Read it all.

Collins…married Diana Kimpton, an actress, in 1955. They had met at a London rally held by the American evangelist Billy Graham. She would put on drama productions in church, as Collins moved away from traditional pulpit preaching, and also train Collins’s curates in public speaking. She died in 2013. He is survived by their children, Dominic and Richenda.
From 1971 Collins served at the semi-rural parish of Canford Magna in Dorset, but led regular missions to London, including the “Leap Step Forward” campaign at HTB, which planted the seeds of its rebirth as a Charismatic evangelical church.

Collins invented what he called the “evangelistic supper party” at which members of his community were encouraged to overcome their qualms, invite friends to dinner and hold discussions about the meaning of life over a glass of wine. It became a highly effective method of evangelising to the chattering classes of Kensington and its affluent surrounds. The suppers were a vital part of the introduction to Christianity course, Alpha, which had been launched at HTB in 1977 and would grow into a global phenomenon.

When he was due to leave HTB in 1985, he made the unusual step for a senior clergyman of staying on for five years as an assistant curate to ensure continuity of mission, while graciously ceding authority to the new vicar, Sandy Miller. At the same time he served as area dean of Chelsea and Prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral. After Collins’s retirement in 1990, his work would be continued by Nicky and Pippa Gumbel.

He continued to study the Bible in Greek. Aptly, his favourite verse remained “Rejoice in the Lord Always” (Philippians, iv, 4). Ironically, for a man some deemed responsible for tambourines in church, Collins was an accomplished classical organist who played every day until the end of his life.

Read it all (subscription).

The Rev John Collins obituaryhttps://t.co/gZ31j5v9OV

— Nicky Gumbel (@nickygumbel) February 4, 2023

THE next Suffragan Bishop of Ebbsfleet will be the Revd Dr Rob Munro, Downing Street announced on Friday. Although Ebbsfleet is in Canterbury diocese, under the House of Bishops Declaration, Dr Munro will function as a bishop to conservative Evangelical parishes across the whole Church of England whose PCCs have passed resolutions on the ministry of women.

The previous Bishop of Ebbsfleet was the Rt Revd Jonathan Goodall, who provided episcopal ministry to traditionalist Anglo-Catholic parishes in Canterbury Province. He resigned last year to become a Roman Catholic….

In July, the Dioceses Commission approved name changes to the bishoprics that provide episcopal ministry to conservatives and traditionalists. The commission ruled that the Ebbsfleet title would go to the successor to the Bishop of Maidstone, the Rt Revd Rod Thomas, who retired in October, and who provided episcopal ministry to parishes that held a complementarian theology (News, 8 July).

The suffragan see of Oswestry, in Lichfield diocese, was revived to provide episcopal ministry to traditionalist Anglo-Catholic parishes. It was announced last week that the Revd Paul Thomas would be the Bishop of Oswestry…

Read it all (subscription or registration).

“We need each other to be the body of Christ. We need not to be a basket of body parts, but to walk together as one body to be a witness to Jesus Christ to our world.” https://t.co/TnnIxJ3mxQ

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) December 12, 2022

Back in 2016, Olasky noted that opposing Trump was risky: “Our call for a different Republican candidate will lose us some readers and donors.” Then in 2021, Trump-era tensions played a major role in his exit at World, after serving as editor for nearly three decades.

“Many people continue to stress that we are electing a president, not a preacher,” said Olasky. “I am also aware that God can do many things outside the limitations of what I think about all of this.”

But Olasky stands by his views in “The American Leadership Tradition” about fidelity and character. “From my selfish point of view,” he added, “the whole Trump era has been a vindication of that book.”

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Olasky flashback: Back to the evangelical clashes over character and two-party politics https://t.co/U6f27LOBeB

— Terry Mattingly (@tweetmattingly) November 28, 2022

The annual State of Giving report from the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) found giving to ministries increased more in 2021 than it had any year out of the last 10. Inflation and the pandemic both raised real concerns for ministry leaders trying to make ends meet, but evangelicals responded to the crises with generosity.

The ECFA survey of about 1,800 members found they received more than $19 billion in donations in 2021. Adjusting for inflation, giving went up by about 3 percent. In the last 10 years, the increase has been closer to 2 percent.

“Contrary to what many expected, giving during the pandemic to ECFA members was strong,” Michael Martin, ECFA president and CEO, wrote in the report. “The findings we unveil emphasize the good work that ECFA members are doing to serve and expand their services in the face of inflation and other challenges.”

If Christians are excited and optimistic about the work of parachurch organizations, though, the numbers reveal a different story when it comes to megachurches. The ECFA surveyed 87 churches that belong to the financial accountability organization. Giving to those congregations dropped by 6.6 percent in 2021, following a decline of 1.1 percent the year before.

Read it all.

Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush who helped craft messages of grief and resolve after 9/11, then explored conservative politics and faith as a Washington Post columnist writing on issues as diverse as President Donald Trump’s disruptive grip on the GOP and his own struggles with depression, died Nov. 17 at a hospital in Washington. He was 58.

The cause of death was complications of cancer, said Peter Wehner, a longtime friend and former colleague.

After years of working as a writer for conservative and evangelical leaders, including Prison Fellowship Ministries founder and Watergate felon Charles Colson, Mr. Gerson joined the Bush campaign in 1999. Mr. Gerson, an evangelical Christian, wrote with an eye toward religious and moral imagery, and that approach melded well with Bush’s personality as a leader open about his own Christian faith.

Read it all.

Grieving the death of my friend @MJGerson. When I hear the words “integrity”and “conscience” and “compassion,” I think of him. He was a faithful Christian and he was faithfully Christlike. We cannot wait to see him again, on the other side of the Jordan.https://t.co/oEHyzlTjMw

— Russell Moore (@drmoore) November 17, 2022

O loving God, who orderest all things by thine unerring wisdom and unbounded love: Grant us in all things to see thy hand; that, following the example and teaching of thy servant Charles Simeon, we may walk with Christ in all simplicity, and serve thee with a quiet and contented mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Charles Simeon was the only evangelical clergyman in Cambridge for some time. He served here at Trinity and faced great opposition. Later he would become provost at King’s College. When he died, all of Cambridge shut down for his funeral. pic.twitter.com/ZiWTl5AM7P

— Ryan N. Danker (@RyanNDanker) April 6, 2022

Gordon Fee once told his students on the first day of a New Testament class at Wheaton College that they would—someday—come across a headline saying “Gordon Fee Is Dead.”

Then, instead of handing out the syllabus like a normal professor, he led the class in Charles Wesley’s hymn, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

Fee, a widely influential New Testament teacher who believed that reading the Bible, teaching the Bible, and interpreting the Bible should bring people into an encounter with a living God, described himself as a “scholar on fire.” He died on Tuesday at the age of 88—although, as those who encountered him in the classroom or in his many books know, that’s not how he would have described it.

Fee co-wrote How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth with Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary colleague Douglas Stuart in the early 1980s. The book is now in its fourth edition and has sold around 1 million copies, becoming for many the standard text on the best way to approach Scripture. Fee also wrote a widely used handbook on biblical interpretation, several well-regarded commentaries on New Testament epistles, and groundbreaking academic research on the place of the Holy Spirit in the life and work of the Apostle Paul.

Read it all.

Died: Gordon Fee, Who Taught Evangelicals to Read the Bible ‘For All Its Worth’ https://t.co/w5PDj9OAQm via @CTmagazine

— Andrea Palpant Dilley (@AndreaPalpant) October 27, 2022

Can you give an example about how we have missed this message in Scripture?

The central passage I use is Colossians 1:15–20. It begins by speaking about Christ creating all things and ends with how the blood of Christ on the cross is redeeming all things. Most people read this redemption in terms of people. But if you zoom out and realize that the “all things” being redeemed are grammatically the same as the “all things” he has created, then you have a universal picture of redemption.

This is reinforced by Romans 8: how creation is waiting for the redemption that will come through the revealing of the children of God.

The church has sometimes struggled over the correct prioritizing of evangelism and social outreach. Does adding a third issue of creation care become too much for some?

Actually, it is the opposite. People working in poverty have realized for a number of years that they are on a treadmill and moving backwards. You cannot make progress in development and ministering to the poor if there are environmental problems that haven’t been addressed.

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Evangelical Creation Care Expert Shares Lessons Learned from Global Tour https://t.co/6AVrwu6VY5 my new article for @CTmagazine, following the presentation in the Middle East pic.twitter.com/jfxhzgKFfv

— Jayson Casper (@jnjcasper) October 19, 2022

As I began editing World thirty years ago I was proposing policies regarding poverty-fighting and related issues that became known as “compassionate conservatism.” The magazine reflected that viewpoint. Today, “national conservatism” or “Christian nationalism” has little room for compassion. As World resisted paranoid lines regarding vaccines, masks, and church closings—all part of a big government plot—our resistance became part of a larger conspiracy theory: World had gone woke.

American journalism history has valuable lessons on how to deal with conspiracy mongers. In 1955 wealthy William F. Buckley, Jr. started a magazine, National Review, that invigorated a conservative movement in disarray. Within a few years Buckley as editor had to fight off the John Birch Society, which asserted—among other oddities—that President Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist. Buckley said Birch founder and head Robert Welch inferred “subjective intention from objective consequences”: Because bad things had happened, U.S. policy makers must have intended them to happen.

John Birchers scrutinized book-buying decisions by local librarians and demanded that some books be removed. When National Review opposed the Birch campaign to impeach Earl Warren, the Supreme Court’s chief justice, many subscribers complained. When one donor said he had supported National Review financially and wanted it to support his concerns, Buckley said the magazine was “not for sale.”

Buckley owned the magazine and maintained his emphasis on independence even when the business side, led by publisher Bill Rusher, worried about reader and revenue loss. Rusher said a “substantial fraction” of readers “bled away” during 1962 and 1963. A direct mail campaign flopped as many on the mailing lists sided with the Birchers.

Buckley stuck with his principles and wrote to Barry Goldwater, “It is essential that we effect a clean break” with the Birch Society.

Read it all.

LONG FORM: A Wrinkle in Journalism History https://t.co/B4aSuubIg0

— Marvin Olasky (@MarvinOlasky) September 14, 2022

We aspire at Christianity Today to advance the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God. The basic question that animates our work is What does it look like to be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ in our time? We hope to be for a new generation what we were for Moore himself when he came across Christianity Today at the age of 15: a capacious and compelling vision of Christian life that opens a path through a fallen world and into the kingdom of God.

That’s why appointing Moore to this position is so important. As president and CEO, I have held the editor in chief position in stewardship for a brief time, but it needs someone to inhabit it fully, and Moore exhibits that way of following Jesus that is deeply rooted, beautifully orthodox, thoughtful and compassionate, and committed to serving the kingdom even at great cost to ourselves.

Significantly, we are also bringing longtime communications and publishing veteran Joy Allmond onto our team to serve as editorial chief of staff. One of the primary charges for Moore will be to continue advancing the Public Theology Project. Allmond will work alongside him to see that project flourish. With an extensive background at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Decision magazine, and Lifeway, Allmond will bring considerable editorial, executive, and interpersonal gifts to the smooth functioning of our publishing enterprise as well as forthcoming events and programs.

Ours is an era of great peril and great promise for the church. We are determined at Christianity Today to do everything we can to serve the church in a turbulent and divisive time, and to love the world God made. We were honored to bring Russell Moore onto the team a little over a year ago. Now we look forward to what he, Allmond, and our extraordinary editorial team can accomplish in the years ahead.

Read it all.

Russell Moore will become CT’s editor in chief Sept. 1.

“Talent alone isn’t the reason for our excitement,” writes CEO @TimDalrymple_. “@drmoore has demonstrated, time and again, the courage to express his convictions and the integrity to live by them.” https://t.co/hNtAlh3JVZ

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) August 4, 2022

There are two reasons to put solar panels on the roofs of Calvin University.

One, renewable energy can provide power for the private Christian campus in Grand Rapids, Michigan, without adding to the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, and nitrous oxide that are driving climate change.

Two, it will save the school some money.

At Calvin, the environmental reason is primary. The budgetary help is a bonus.

“I think taking care of the planet is a prerequisite to being a Christian,” Tim Fennema, vice president for administration and finance, told CT. “And as a Christian university, it’s something we want to do.”

Calvin is on a mission to be carbon neutral by 2057. The school got a little closer last month when it announced a partnership with the Indiana-based Sun FundED to come up with a plan to install solar arrays on university buildings, offsetting the high-carbon energy sources Calvin currently uses to heat, cool, and power the campus.

Read it all.

More evangelical colleges and universities are trying to reduce carbon emissions by moving away from fossil fuels https://t.co/YaE3A0X5uh

— Daniel Silliman (@danielsilliman) August 3, 2022

Ron’s loyalty was to Scripture. He was no more radical than John Wesley or Charles Finney (and certainly far less radical than Saint Anthony and Saint Francis).

As I once pointed out to him, he was much more conciliatory than the biblical figures of Amos; Jeremiah; John the Baptist (Luke 3:11); and, most important of all, the Lord Jesus, who said we cannot be his disciples unless we surrender all our possessions (Luke 12:33; 14:33).

Although Ron was often associated with the evangelical Left, he remained consistently pro-life and insisted that the church should maintain biblical sexual ethics. I’m pretty sure that he and I didn’t always vote the same way, despite our agreement on ethics, but I never doubted that his vote was informed by his biblical conscience.

In conversation, I found him ready to embrace what he saw as the best solutions from either side of today’s (tragically polarized) political aisle, and he maintained contacts on both sides of that split. He always remained the consistent evangelical Anabaptist that he was—living simply and sacrificially and working on behalf of the needy. The 2013 book of essays dedicated in his honor is fittingly titled Following Jesus: Journeys in Radical Discipleship.

Read it all.

From CTmagazine: An advocate for the environment. An opponent of apartheid. Consistently pro-life. Concerned for the poor.

In memory of Ron Sider, who spoke to evangelicals about social justice & the mainline church about evangelism: https://t.co/oQ4JNJxjvs

— Carol Flohr Giles (@giles_carol) August 2, 2022

Ronald J. Sider, organizer of the evangelical left and author of ‘Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger,’ died on Wednesday at 82. His son told followers that Sider had suffered from a sudden cardiac arrest.

For nearly 50 years, Sider called evangelicals to care about the poor and see poverty as a moral issue. He argued for an expanded understanding of sin to include social structures that perpetuate inequality and injustice, and urged Christians to see how their salvation should compel them to care for their neighbors.

“Salvation is a lot more than just a new right relationship with God through forgiveness of sins. It’s a new, transformed lifestyle that you can see visible in the body of believers,” he said. “Sin is a biblical category. Given a careful reading of the world and the Bible and our giving patterns, how can we come to any other conclusion than to say that we are flatly disobeying what the God of the Bible says about the way he wants his people to care for the poor?”

Read it all.

Ron Sider has died.

He was known for his advocacy for the poor and was called the “burr in the ethical saddle” of the white evangelical horse. https://t.co/AMJQ5lWLqi

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) July 28, 2022

The Christian faith always has direct social implications. It is not a privatised religion but overflows into practical action and community transformation. This is seen clearly in the Alpha movement, which has been putting on courses for 45 years. Alpha is a global phenomenon, one of the leading brands in Christian evangelisation, created at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) in central London. More than 28 million people have attended the course worldwide, nearly five million in the UK, and many have become Christians as a result. Alpha’s pioneer, the former barrister Nicky Gumbel, has won plaudits as a Billy Graham for the modern age.

Alpha’s ambition, expressed in its famous catchphrase, is to see not only “lives changed” but also “society transformed”. Alpha has matured over three decades, with frequent revision of Gumbel’s books and films, and this emphasis has become increasingly explicit. For example, he suggests that to pray “Your Kingdom Come” in the Lord’s Prayer is to pray for the nation to be transformed in the areas of politics, economics, social justice, crime and education. Drawing lessons from church history, he praises John Wesley, the father of Methodism, as not only a preacher by also “a prophet of social righteousness”. Gumbel’s other heroes include campaigners such as William Wilberforce, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Questions of Life, the core Alpha text, has sold more than 1.7 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 40 languages. Recent editions reveal a great leap forward in the maturing of Gumbel’s social theology. “We experience the Holy Spirit not just so that we have a warm feeling in our hearts,” he declares, “but so that we go out and make a difference to our world.” Another of his popular paperbacks, The Heart of Revival, was published in the late 1990s, when many churches were excitedly looking for evidence of “revival”. Gumbel wrote: “True and lasting revival changes not only human hearts but also communities and institutions. Love for God and love for neighbour go hand in hand.”

Read it all (requires subscription).

Well conceived piece by Andrew Atherstone on the maturing of the Alpha Course: "The Christian faith always has direct social implications. It is not a privatised religion but overflows into practical action and community transformation."https://t.co/tOZ1h0qOgj

— Graham Tomlin (@gtomlin) July 16, 2022

Almighty and everlasting God,
Creator and Sustainer of the universe,
I worship you.

Lord Jesus Christ,
Savior and Lord of the world,
I worship you.

Holy Spirit,
Sanctifier of the people of God,
I worship you.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit
As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Lord Jesus Christ, I pray that this day I may take up my cross and follow you.

Holy Spirit, I pray that this day your fruit will ripen my life:

Love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness and self-control.

Holy, blessed and glorious Trinity,
Three persons in one God,
have mercy upon me. Amen.

–Ted Schroder, John Stott: A summary of his teaching (Manchester: Piquant Publishing, 2021) pp.7-8

'God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity'

Today is #TrinitySunday when we celebrate the mystery of the triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

All are welcome to join us for services in the Abbey, including Sung Eucharist at 11:15am and Evensong at 3pm: https://t.co/rFXRivhe2h pic.twitter.com/5eGlizA7qi

— Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) June 12, 2022

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The evangelical church faces a 'state of emergency' over the pandemic and politics, Andy Stanley says – CNN https://t.co/yXHflRxtT8

— Eric Frazier (@ericfraz) June 4, 2022

According to Daniel French there is an increasingly “underground” aspect to conservative Christian life in the UK — believers have woken up to the fact that the culture is against them, and in many cases even traditional religious leaders too.

Another of his UK allies, Dr James Orr, believes that Rod Dreher is destined to have a significant impact on our conservatism. “His insights are proving more salient with every week that passes, not only for Christians but for all those who are beginning to feel the consequences of rejecting the West’s Christian inheritance.

“As hyper-progressivism continues to colonise the UK public square with neuralgic imports from the US culture wars, I predict that more and more people in the UK will start to take Dreher’s jeremiads seriously and pay attention to his constructive proposals.”

Whether or not James Orr is right, Dreher is interesting not just for who he is, but for what he represents. He stands at a newly emergent nexus of traditional European conservatism, English realism, and American romanticism and religiosity. With an increasingly sterile politics, caught between technocratic centrism and the hollow battles of the culture wars, there’s a desperate need for new ideas, and fresh approaches. This is a man worth listening to.

Read it all.

My first print piece for @TheCriticMag – I spoke to @roddreher and discovered a paradoxical and complex conservatism, deeply marked by the problem we all face in the modern age: the search for meaning, rootedness and community in a world that rejects them. https://t.co/7djuyI0rYP

— Sebastian Milbank 🥀🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (@JSMilbank) April 27, 2022

For the past few years, Bible teacher and best-selling author Beth Moore has been one tweet away from disaster.

Moore, perhaps the best-known ex-Southern Baptist in the country, will recount her Twitter battles, her split with her former denomination and, more importantly, her lifelong journey with Jesus, in a new memoir titled “All My Knotted-Up Life,” due out from Tyndale in April 2023.

News of the memoir was first reported by Cathy Lynn Grossman of Publishers Weekly. Tyndale publisher Karen Watson told PW that the memoir will be a “southern literary reflection on an unlikely and winsomely remarkable life.”

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Jesus saved @BethMooreLPM's life. Twitter blew it up. Now she's writing all about it https://t.co/QYP90bTzrb via @RNS

— Bob Smietana (@bobsmietana) April 26, 2022

For more than a dozen years, Christianity Today failed to hold two ministry leaders accountable for sexual harassment at its Carol Stream, Illinois, office.

A number of women reported demeaning, inappropriate, and offensive behavior by former editor in chief Mark Galli and former advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye. But their behavior was not checked and the men were not disciplined, according to an external assessment of the ministry’s culture released Tuesday.

The report identified a pair of problems at the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism: a poor process for “reporting, investigating, and resolving harassment allegations” and a culture of unconscious sexism that can be “inhospitable to women.” CT has made the assessment public.

Read it all.

It's weird and hard and also good to read this and see so much truth of what I and other women who worked at CT saw and experienced. Thanks to @CTmagazine @danielsilliman @kateshellnutt for reporting and writing this. https://t.co/t1t8kb5Vzf

— Laura Leonard (@lmarieleonard) March 15, 2022

Vanessa Franklin lost her mother, her father, and her husband in a 12-month span. But the grief of their deaths paled in comparison to parting with her three teenage daughters in the same year, 2008, when she went to prison for fraud.

“Being separated from them was worse,” said Franklin, who served four years in Oklahoma.

She couldn’t imagine a deeper hurt until a few years later, when her daughter, Ashley Garrison, was sentenced while pregnant. The 20-year-old went into labor the day she checked into prison.

Garrison had a boy and named him William. She held him for an hour before she was forced to relinquish custody to his father’s family.

Read it all.

As the female prison population continues to rise, there are more horror stories of pregnant women giving birth behind bars.

Christian ministries and advocates are stepping in. @MariaforW reports:https://t.co/sxCor4u8UP

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) February 22, 2022

John the Baptist was not being unreasonable when he sent his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Luke 7:20) And when the disciples on the road to Emmaus said to their traveling companion, the recently crucified Jesus, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (24:21)—Jesus revealed to them that their hopes has been met in ways they couldn’t have imagined until that very moment.

The question is not whether we will deconstruct, but what we will deconstruct.

Will it be the wood, hay, and stubble that is destined to burn up and burn out? Or will it be our own souls? Sometimes the people we think are “deconstructing” are just grieving and asking God where he is at a moment like this. That has happened before.

By contrast, sometimes the people who appear most confident and certain—who are scanning the boundaries for heretics—are those who have given up belief in the new birth, in the renewal of the mind, and in the judgment seat of Christ. For them, all that’s left is an orthodoxy grounded not in a living Christ, but in a curated brand.

And that may be the saddest deconstruction of all.

Read it all.

"If our moral ideals are strong but we reassure ourselves with a false version of reality, we will end up seeing through our own delusions—and others certainly will." –@drmoore https://t.co/gCdgiAAF3m

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) February 11, 2022

Of course there is a lot of division across many parts of American society. But for evangelicals, who have dedicated their lives to Jesus, the problem is deeper. Christians are supposed to believe in the spiritual unity of the church. While differing over politics and other secondary matters, they are in theory supposed to be unified by their shared first love — as brothers and sisters in Christ. Their common devotion is supposed to bring out the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

“We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord,” say the opening lines of a famous Christian song commonly known as “By Our Love.” In its chorus it proclaims, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love.” The world envisioned by that song seems very far away right now. The bitter recriminations have caused some believers to wonder if the whole religion is a crock.

Russell Moore resigned from his leadership position in the Southern Baptist Convention last spring over the denomination’s resistance to addressing the racism and sexual abuse scandals in its ranks. He tells me that every day he has conversations with Christians who are losing their faith because of what they see in their churches. He made a haunting point last summer when I saw him speak in New York State at a conference at a Bruderhof community, which has roots in the Anabaptist tradition. “We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches,” he said, “but because they believe that the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.”

The proximate cause of all this disruption is Trump. But that is not the deepest cause. Trump is merely the embodiment of many of the raw wounds that already existed in parts of the white evangelical world: misogyny, racism, racial obliviousness, celebrity worship, resentment and the willingness to sacrifice principle for power.

Read it all.

Worth reading and reflecting, by @nytdavidbrooks with @KSPrior, @DavidAFrench, et al. “The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself” https://t.co/GDhkPG4Cvo

— Dr. Michael J. Svigel (@Svigel) February 5, 2022

At a time when pastors feel particularly under pressure, here’s some good news from the pews: Evangelical churchgoers are pretty happy with how things are going at their churches.

Most don’t think the sermons are too long; if anything, they’d like to see more in-depth teaching from leaders. They aren’t bothered by too many messages about giving. They don’t think social issues and politics play an outsized role in the teaching.

That’s according to a new survey of evangelical churchgoers in the US, the Congregational Scorecard conducted by Grey Matter Research and Consulting and Infinity Concepts.

Around three-quarters are satisfied with their congregation approach to various areas of church life and wouldn’t want it to change, the survey found.

Read it all.

Evangelicals are largely happy with their church and its teaching—if anything, they want to see pastors go more in-depth.

New Grey Matter survey: https://t.co/AhIzO2wpba

— kate shellnutt (@kateshellnutt) January 18, 2022