Sometime toward the end of my tenure at our little rural church in eastern Washington, a neighbor offered to take me on a tour north of town. There was nothing much to see, just some sagebrush and weeds near the interstate overpass. I leaned into the wind while he kicked around at a row of…

The era of the Reformation is often seen as a watershed in the practice of personal Bible reading, as the invention of the printing press and new vernacular translations made the Scriptures more available and affordable to a wider audience. While the Reformers advocated for their adherents to read the Scriptures regularly for themselves, these…

Throughout the history of the church, prayer has been seen as an indispensable spiritual discipline, and this remained true during the era of the Reformation. In this encouragement to prayer, Lutheran pastor Johann Spangenberg (1484-1550) calls on his audience to reach out to the Lord, knowing with confidence that he is listening and ready to…

Smith, James K.A. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016. 210 pp. An Impulse to Pray Several years ago I had the opportunity to take a mission trip to rural Haiti. It was a challenging experience, not least because several of our team members began to experience what…

“You have to understand how shocked I am to be in this interview.I assured my husband, when we were engaged, that I would never join a church staff.” Stacie was a vibrant, passionate, highly gifted thirty-something. We were pursuing her as our Associate Pastor of Disciple-making. She was currently a doctoral philosophy student, a veteran…

Location: First Baptist Church, Conway AK Date: November 13, 1979 Scripture: John 14:1-27 Anxiety in the Christian life is not merely a contemporary phenomenon. The disciples of Jesus, Carl Henry explains, were anxious about Jesus’ death and departure. They wondered what life would look like without the Messiah in whom they had placed their faith and to whom…

Location: Southern Baptist Convention Pastor’s Conference, St. Louis MO Date: 1987 Scripture: Ecclesiastes 12:1-7 At the encroachment of subjectivity, dehumanization, and relative morality – as he calls it, “neo-paganism” – Carl Henry responds with the loud call to “Remember God” as depicted in the book of Ecclesiastes. Henry’s interpretation of Eccl 12:1-7 comes in the…