Victoria Osteen made headlines across the country last week with a statement she made in church. Victoria is the wife of Joel and co-pastor with him of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, the nation’s largest congregation with an average Sunday attendance of 44,000 and an international television audience in the tens of millions. The two are arguably the highest profile church leaders in America. They’re also the best known proponents of what’s called the prosperity gospel, the belief that God wants everyone to be wealthy, healthy and happy. Their best-selling books and sold-out conferences describe how everyday people can reach that goal. Despite the critical theological questions that more […]
Read More“As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for Thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; When shall I come and appear before God?” – Psalm 42:1-2
Read More
A friend in the Middle East is a religious refugee from a repressive Islamic nation. He and his family are courageous and faithful, having lost everything in their flight from persecution. He recently posted on his facebook page a picture taken of a Christian home in his region. The image is at the top of the blog. It’s the Arabic letter “N,” which stands for “Nazarene.” That’s what Muslims often call Christians since Jesus was from Nazareth. The symbol is painted on Christian homes and businesses to mark them as targets for theft, violence and even death. My friend put the image on his facebook page as a sign of solidarity […]
Read More“Dreams and destiny are connected. If you don’t dream you’ll never achieve your dreams…Ask God to awaken your dreaming nature. Expect Him to energize you with creativity and passion. He wants you to live – really live – and fulfill the destiny He planned for you.” – Dutch Sheets
Read More
Tim Wright blogs this week about the self-inflicted crisis many churches are experiencing right now. As young adult church attendance continues to decline, Wright points to age-segregated worship services as the main culprit. Wright observes that that over the last few decades, as churches have attempted to make their worship services more convenient for the boomer generation, they’ve created a separate worship experience for boomers’ kids. The practice has been catastrophic for the younger generation: …as we shifted kids out of the main worship experience, en-culturated them in their own program, and robbed them of any touch points with the rest of the body of Christ. Another way […]
Read MoreI met recently with one of our church’s younger couples. They’re like so many couples in our community: both are hard-working; they love their kids; and they both know the Lord and are serving him here in our church. And in one other respect they’re also like many couples—they’re struggling in their marriage. The pressures of young kids, finances, jobs and the demands of family life have just worn them out. They didn’t intend for their marriage to reach a critical place but it did. We started meeting together a couple of months ago. We’ve talked and cried and prayed together. Then they started the hard work of reclaiming […]
Read More
Lifeway Research director Ed Stetzer is the guru of church statistics, and his recent analysis of the church drop-out rate among young adults is worth paying attention to. While the situation isn’t as dire as some have made it out to be, the truth is that many children and students who were brought up in church leave their religious upbringing as soon as they leave home. You can read the full article here I’ve been in pastoral ministry a long time, and I’ve seen this scenario play out more times than I want to remember. An active church family watches helplessly as their child—or children—leave not only the church […]
Read MoreOptimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse ‘in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, […]
Read MoreLast week I joined a group from our church and travelled half way around the world on what we call a mission trip. We call it that because the purpose is the same as that of missionaries down through the years—to take the message of Jesus into distant areas. Areas where people haven’t heard of Jesus or where the opposition to his message is so extreme that few people have had a real chance to respond. Our congregation has for many years been engaged with mission trips to Central Asia, the strange, desolate land that lies at the juncture of with Russia, the Middle East and Europe. Full […]
Read MoreIt’s Monday night, and I’m with a ministry team from our church at a local prison. There are about ten of us there, men and women. Most of them came earlier and helped serve an Easter meal to five hundred inmates—turkey, dressing, green beans, rolls and dessert. I think the meal must have been a hit because the men keep talking about how good the dressing was. Now it’s 6:30, and the small chapel is filling up. It holds about one hundred men. Another eighty or so are in the Visitation Room across the way, watching the service via a cable TV signal. There’s great energy in the room, […]
Read More