The Church

A Vestige of Holiness: Why I Am an Evangelical

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Evangelicalism is a renewal movement within Protestant Christianity which arose from the eighteenth-century revival movements of John Wesley and George Whitefield. Committed to historic Christian orthodoxy, evangelicalism has four main characteristics: biblicism (affirming the supreme Authority of Scripture), conversionism (affirming the need for personal conversion to following Jesus in order to be saved), activism (affirming … Read more

The Triumph of the Therapeutic and the Subversion of the American Church

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“Verily there is that which is more contrary to Christianity, and to the very nature of Christianity, than any heresy, any schism, more contrary than all heresies and all schisms combined, and that is, to play Christianity.” – Soren Kierkegaard Over 50 years ago, sociologist Philip Rief’s insightful work The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses … Read more

The Church Should Be Welcoming But Not Inclusive

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At one of my previous churches, the congregation held a lengthy discernment process regarding whether we should change the church’s moral teachings about a particular sin. Throughout this process, the two words that people repeated again and again were the words “welcoming” and “inclusion.” In spite of the fact that no one was able to … Read more

The Visibility of the Church

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According to the New Testament, the church is God’s holy covenant people.  It is the family of God.  It is the community of Jesus’s disciples.  It is the body of Christ.  It is the redeemed and renewed humanity, the firstfruits of God’s new creation.   When we look at the church as it exists today and … Read more

On Collective Responsibility and Guilt

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Many modern Western Christians are highly resistant to the idea that there could be such a thing as collective or communal moral responsibility or guilt.  How can I, many ask, be morally responsible for something that someone else has done?  Such an attitude stems from the  individualism of modern Western culture, which deeply affects us … Read more

Foundations of Christian Ethics: The Church Community

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This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Foundations of Christian Ethics

Most modern Western people tend to think of ethics in a very individualistic manner.  They consider the primary ethical question to be, “What should I do?”  The same can be said of most modern Western Christians.  They consider the primary ethical question to be, “What does God want me to do?”  The Church may be … Read more

The Importance of Church Discipline

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Discipline in the Christian Community The church is the community of Jesus’s disciples.  Every community is a group of people who gather around a set of shared values and/or goals.  The values and goals of the church are proclaiming the gospel, being conformed to the image of Christ, and advancing God’s Kingdom.  At the practical … Read more