Reformation21

We had a special service in our church this evening. The traditions of Scottish Highland evangelical piety in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to the 'Question' meeting. This was a meeting in which the laymen of the church could participate; and in which they often showed...

The Presbyterian Layman reports that after first voting to remove "homosexual perversion" from the list of sins found in the Heidelberg Confession, the PC(USA) then approved a $2 million warchest to wage legal combat against the New Wineskins group (a large group of churches seeking to leave the...

Summer vacation (as well as a teaching trip to Regent College in Vancouver) begins next week. As I anticipate laying down many of the burdens of pastoral care, at least for a little while, here is a salutary reminder of my calling, from Bishop Daniel A. Payne's "The Christian Ministry: Its Moral...

Writing in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society , David Wells explains what our church and our culture need: "The renewal of which we stand in need, I believe, is of both the understanding of truth and of our knowledge of the God of that truth. It is not one or the other but it is the...

The latest edition of the 9Marks journal is on marriage and the church. Note especially the marriage comparison chart with mini-reviews of a number of books.

I have a bad habit: I keep adding books to my growing pile beside my bed. This morning, I finished a book that wasn't on this list : Christian Scharen's Faith as a Way of Life . Originating out of Yale's Center for Faith and Culture and funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc.'s Sustaining Pastoral...

My wife and I are off to Peru tomorrow on a mission trip for a week and I'm uncertain if I'll be able to blog from the Southern Hemisphere! On my way, I've decided to dip into Colin Duriez's new biography of Francis Schaeffer ( Francis Schaeffer: an Authentic Life published by Crossway and see Tim...

One quick addition to my summer reading list: Garth Rosell's The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism. Ockenga was in the first graduating class of Westminster, among the faculty and student exiles from Princeton. Eventually he became pastor...

The problem with living in the Caribbean is you don't really have seasons. Who knew it was summer and you could read differently? While all the tourist come down, snorkel, and bathe in the sun with a wonderful novel, us poor Caribbean pastors continue on in the same old sunshine and heat, reading...

Compliance is good, even if it comes late, which is to say I finally have my summer reading list to add to the mix. I'm working on a book on American religious history this summer, so I'll be reading just about anything I can find on that topic. That's work, though. I hope to get through all of...