Journey into Church Planting (part 1)—Introduction “He leads me in paths of righteousness, for His Name’s sake.” Ps 23:3b Recently, I began a year-long church-planting apprenticeship at my church, Redeemer Fellowship. This program will equip and train me to lead a new church plant and then serve as its senior pastor. While the notion of […]
Category: Writings on Christianity
6 Points to Help You Talk about the Trinity (Tsouloufis) My Friend Dan Tsouloufis wrote a brief explanation on how we as Christians are to talk about God as a Trinity. I think its really helpful: As believers, we need to be able to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity in concise language that’s understandable […]
“I’m beginning to believe more and more that John did not think Jesus was God.” This was a comment I heard from a Bible professor at a recent SBL (Society of Biblical Literature) conference of which I participated in. Considering the range of people who participate in these conferences, I was not completely shocked at […]
Suffering For The Sake of Christ For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have. (Phil 1:29-30 ESV) In Phil 1:29-30 […]
My friend Dan Tsouloufis is passionate about teaching and helping Christians thinking critically about their faith. He gave me permission to share something he wrote to help Christians defend and consider a biblical worldview. Here it is: The Six Fundamental Truths of Theistic Philosophy (From a Judeo-Christian Worldview) by DanTsouloufis I feel compelled to […]
JESUS AS YAHWEH THE GOD OF ISRAEL How could any Jew in the first century have considered Jesus to be God? How do understanding Jewish notions of monotheism from that period help us in this question? British evangelical scholar Richard Bauckham has given us one of the best answers to these questions in his essay […]
Is God calling you into vocational ministry? How do you know? How can you be sure? The English puritan William Perkins gives us a very helpful answer to this question in his book “The Calling of Ministry.” To know that one is being calling into ministry requires three things: a genuine desire (affirmed by your […]
Here are more quotes from Charles Bridges’ “Christian Ministry”: 11. Need to pursue life with the eyes of faith: “Daily experience reminds us the extreme difficulty of maintaining spiritual perceptions of eternal things. The surrounding objects of time and sense spread a thick film over the organs of spiritual vision, and the indistinct haziness, in […]
As mentioned in my previous post, here are some of my favorite quotes from Charles Bridges’ “Christian Ministry” 1. Summary of Christian ministry: “the sum of our whole labor in this kind is to honor God, and to save men” (8). 2. What our task is not: “It is not our province to prescribe what […]
For the past several months I have been working my way through a stack of pastoral theology books. Recently, I finished Charles Bridges’ “The Christian Ministry—with An Inquiry into the Causes of its Inefficiency.” First published in 1830, the work has managed to remain surprising relevant for all who wish to consider the task of […]