Christian Church

Just to lay my cards on the table: whenever the New Testament references the calling of believers, it is always a reference to our salvation or its fruits in our lives, what theologians have termed the effectual call of God [i] . Yes, there is the general call of the Gospel that goes out to all the...

Jaroslav Jan Vajda – Singing the Language of Today’s Hearts While shaving in front of his bathroom mirror, Jaroslav Jan Vajda, then editor of the former Lutheran magazine This Day , wondered how to fill a blank page for an issue that was going to the printer in three days. His mind went back to a...

Georgi Vins and the Christian Resistance to Soviet Religious Persecution On April 26, 1979, 50-year-old Georgi Petrovich Vins was woken up in his cell in the labor camp where he had been serving sentence for four years. He was asked to change into his own clothes, flown to Moscow, then told that he...

William Shedd and the Genocide of Assyrian Christians William Ambrose Shedd was born January 24, 1865, in the mountain village of Seir, near Urmia, in today’s Northwestern Iran, near Turkey. About one quarter of the population at that time was Assyrian, and predominantly Christian. According to...

In our last post we considered Paul’s warning to believers in the Galatian churches, ‘If you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another’ (Ga 5.15). And we noted that, sadly, this warning needs to be repeated to every church in every generation. The family of God...

Francis James Grimké – Through a Pandemic and Social Unrest We are not the first generation who must deal with a pandemic and racial unrest at the same time. The Spanish flu of 1918 hit America at a time when racial segregation and lynching of blacks were commonplace and largely ignored by the...

Daniel Rowland and the Welsh 18 th -century Revival Llangeitho is a small village in the center of Wales. Today, its population counts just a little more than 800 people. It was even smaller in the 18 th century. And yet, thousands of people arrived on Sundays from all over Wales, traveling on foot...

In 2003 the Free Church of Scotland published an updated psalter entitled Sing Psalms where Psalm 16 versus 8 through 11 reads thus: “Before me constantly, I set the Lord alone. Because he is at my right hand I'll not be overthrown. Therefore my heart is glad; my tongue with joy will sing. My body...

The Birth of Early Christian Nations –Truth and Legend The accounts of the birth of early Christian nations is often shrouded in legend, as stories were told and retold, but there are still enough historical records to show that much of them are true. Grigor and the Brave Women of Armenia Armenia...

Every Day Matters Brandon Crowe is the associate professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, and the author of several books—most of them on the theology of the Old Testament. This time, he’s written a book on productivity, which piqued our curiosity. In the past decade or so,...