A Home Church Ministry
My wife and I were called into the mission field in 2010, where we spent the next decade working with the underground Church. What we experienced there forever changed us in ways that we really didn't understand. We didn't really have to wrestle with the realities of these changes until well after we returned home. …
Authority matters. The question of "authority" has divided the Church, "east against west", "Catholic against Orthodox", and "Protestant against Catholic/Orthodox traditions". So unity will always suffer so long as the question of authority remains ambiguous and unclear. I believe the Protestant reformation re-introduced one central truth that was desperately needed within the Church. And that …
This has been a reoccurring conversation I've had with many people over the years. The problem with this idea, when used wrongly, is that it conflates the text itself with our reading of the text, and then treats any challenge as a challenge to Scripture itself. When used this way, the phrase essentially becomes a …
We have to pause and think about what's happening right now. I realize that some people are so numb and weary that they're simply ignoring what's happening, while others are outraged and being consumed by rage. And I realize that there are those who are still making excuses for the President's conduct for political purposes, …
We believe that the Father is the unbegotten source of the Godhead. We believe that the Son is begotten of the Father, deriving his existence from the Father by generation. And we believe that the Spirit is proceeding from the Father, deriving his existence from the Father by procession. This is expresses the essential Nicene …
Continue reading "Meditations on the Trinity & the New Creation"
How should Christians navigate the endless stream of social media posts that try to provoke our responses? Let's think through how Christians should engage in social media.
I think very few institutions right now expose our political and moral confusion quite like "Immigration and Customs Enforcement". Most Americans look at overwhelmed systems, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and security threats and conclude that some form of border enforcement is necessary. And many Americans are troubled by what they fear is the political interest …
Continue reading "ICE, the State, and the Confused Christian Conscience"
Can a Christian's political stances ever disqualify their Christian profession? In this post we're going to apply a threefold test to help determine if something is "Christian" or not.
With so much confusion and chaos in the world, people need solid ground to stand upon. Jesus said his word was like a rock upon which we could build our life. But we need to understand what that means. Let's think about that!
This post responds to Dr. Joshua Sijuwade’s The Identity of the Church: A Comprehensive Argument for the Truth of Eastern Orthodoxy, which claims that the Eastern Orthodox Church best fulfills the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed’s vision of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” While appreciating the intellectual rigor of Sijuwade’s argument, the author challenges the underlying assumption that the one Church must correspond to a single, historically continuous institution. Drawing from Ephesians 4 and the teachings of Jesus, the post argues that the Church’s unity is spiritual, not institutional—rooted in the shared life of believers who abide in Christ and are joined together by the Spirit. The true continuity of the Church is the ongoing work of the Spirit among all who follow Jesus, not an unbroken chain of organizational lineage. Historic and structural continuity have value but do not define the Church’s identity; faithfulness to Christ does. The Church, therefore, is not a denomination we can point to, but a people who together embody the love, faith, and hope of the gospel.
A Dedicated Faith 