Note: This post is an update from an earlier one since Google Inbox has been depreciated. I teach a PhD course at Southwestern Seminary in… Read More »Getting Things Done: Google Calendar, Gmail + Evernote = Productivity
Gospel ministry is filled with both great difficulty and great encouragements. When ministers are discouraged, one of the ways that the Lord strengthens them is… Read More »Encouragement to Ministers
A.W. Tozer had the uncommon ability to step aside from his own culture, and see as alien what had become natural. Tozer saw that the… Read More »Tozer’s Second Concern – Pragmatism
The Christian faith is Trinitarian. We worship the one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One of the ways we rightly respond to the… Read More »Christian Worship is Trinitarian
Any time we closely study Scripture, we come away learning God’s will, valuable lessons about Christian living, and new emphases we had not previously took… Read More »What 2 Peter taught me about Christian ministry
Martin Luther did not want to revolutionize completely the traditional worship of the Western church. He did, however, believe that preaching of the Word had… Read More »Luther on the centrality of the Word in worship
Conservative Christian churches are not eccentric. They believe they are merely consistent in their understanding and application of Christianity. They believe that the Christianity they… Read More »Conclusion: Brothers, We Are Not Populists
Fostering a right view towards the Christian tradition is part of true Christianity. Conservative pastors will do their best to see the Christian tradition rightly… Read More »Fostering a Love for Tradition
If we are to grow a right view of the Christian tradition within our churches, we will have to overcome the ‘suspicion of tradition’ that… Read More »Rightly Evaluating Tradition
The religious scene of the country in which I minister is populated by mainline Protestant churches, some of whom place great emphasis on tradition. However,… Read More »Rightly Viewing Tradition
A church that is self-consciously conservative has a relationship with both the past and the future. If we are conserving Christianity, we must be conserving… Read More »Conservatives and Tradition
Christians’ affections are greatly shaped by the moral imagination. The moral imagination is largely shaped by the meaning of the various media it encounters. This… Read More »Form and Meaning
Ours is not a particularly reflective age. When a pastor begins speaking of the meaning of the media, devices and technologies that surround us, he… Read More »Encouraging Reflectiveness
Once a pastor has it settled in his mind that sola Scriptura does not require him to ignore, dismiss or reject extra-biblical sources of knowledge,… Read More »A World of Meaning
If pastors are to shepherd churches in which there is a desire to understand the meaning of the world and apply it to worship, obedience… Read More »The Pastor and Sola Scriptura
Two propositions summarize why a conservative Christian church is concerned with meaning: Christians are humans, and Christians live in the world. What is the world?… Read More »The Christian and Meaning
Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us… Read More »A Christian Imagination
Many of the pastors I have met are unwitting moderns. I should know, for I am also a pastor, and a recovering modern. That is,… Read More »Imagination and Shaping the Affections
The cultivation of ordinate affection depends on several areas we have already covered in this series. A pastor determined to conserve biblical Christianity will be… Read More »More than Cognitive
Much has been said everywhere about the decline of religious belief; not so much notice has been taken of the decline of religious sensibility. The… Read More »Culture and Cultivation of the Affections