Childhood identity theft. It’s a real thing. Thieves steal children’s Social Security numbers and then appropriate their financial identities for personal profit. “Children represent an emerging market for identity thieves who steal their Social Security numbers because they offer clean slates that can be used to commit fraud for years without detection,” one CPA has […]
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Church History: Forget About St. Valentine! Today Is St. Cyril’s Day
The Magnificent Moravian Failures Who Weren’t Failures at All In the ninth century A.D.—four hundred years or so after the fall of the Western Empire—a prince in the land of Moravia asked the emperor of the Eastern Empire to send missionaries to his people. The prince’s motives were primarily political. He needed the support of […]
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Culture: The Failure of White Evangelicals in the Civil Rights Movement
A few months ago, Justin Taylor interviewed four evangelical historians about the role of Southern white evangelicals in the American Civil Rights Movement. It is a lengthy and painful read, but it provides a much-needed perspective on white evangelicals’ persistent failure to challenge systemic racism. Here are a few excerpts: Matt Hall: The unfortunate reality […]
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Family Ministry: Museum of the Bible, the One Trip to Plan for Your Family This Year
On November 17, 2017, the much-anticipated Museum of the Bible will be opening in Washington, D.C. with more than 40,000 objects on display in a 430,000-square-foot structure, three blocks from the Capitol Building. The collection includes artifacts from the time of Abraham, fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as biblical papyri and manuscripts, […]
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Blog: Most-Read Posts of 2016 and Plans for 2017
Around twenty-seven thousand people racked up nearly one hundred thousand views of this blog in 2016. If you were one of them, thank you! Since there are no advertisements on my site, I don’t profit from any of the content. And so, if you’ve profited from what I’ve written, please consider purchasing a book (or two […]
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Advent: Finding Joy When God Seems Silent
Advent is the season when we meditate on experiences of waiting and silence in the Scriptures. By coming to terms with the waiting that we see in Scripture, we prepare our souls for those moments when God seems silent in our own lives. One of the ways we prepare ourselves for this silence is by […]
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Family Ministry: How Adoption Taught Me to Trust My Heavenly Father More
Thirteen years ago this week, we finalized the adoption of our first child. In the spring of 2003, a seven-year-old girl had struggled up the front steps of our home in Oklahoma, tattered vinyl suitcase clutched to her chest. In the room where we had wept so often for the baby that never came, I […]
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Culture: C.S. Lewis and the False Promise of Pornography
“We are fast becoming a pornographic society. Over the course of the last decade, explicitly sexual images have crept into…virtually every niche of American life,” R. Albert Mohler writes. “By some estimations, the production and sale of explicit pornography now represents the seventh-largest industry in America.” Pornography has become—as William Struthers has pointed out in his […]
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Family Ministry: Discipleship and Family in African-American History
A few months ago, I sat down with my colleagues Kevin Smith and Kevin Jones to discuss the dynamics of discipleship and family ministry in African-American communities. Rev. Smith is the executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland and Delaware. Dr. Jones is a scholar of the history of education and coauthor of the […]
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Culture: Is Christianity Headed South?
Is Christianity headed south? Year after year, Western culture continues to grow increasingly secularized. Secularization is—in the words of Baptist theologian R. Albert Mohler— the process by which a society becomes more and more distant from its Christian roots. Though the formal sociological theory is more complicated than that, the essence of secularization is the […]
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Family Ministry: The Radical Book for Kids
Do you want to cultivate your older children’s curiosity and shape their souls at the same time? Here’s a new book that will help you to fulfill both of those goals. As I flipped through page after colorful page in The Radical Book for Kids: Exploring the Roots and Shoots of Faith, one thought kept recurring […]
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Giveaway: Win a Free Four Views of the End Times Pamphlet
This pamphlet that comes with my Four Views of the End Times video series provides you with a quick guide to what Christians throughout history have taught and thought about the end of time—and it’s small enough for you to slip into your Bible for rapid reference anytime. This week, I’m giving away three of these handy […]
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Church History: Martin Luther and the Ninety-Five Theses
On October 31, 1517, a monk and professor named Martin Luther sent a document entitled Disputatio Pro Declaratione Virtutis Indulgentiarum to the archbishop of Mainz. This Disputatio consisted of ninety-five theses for theological debate. Perhaps on October 31 or more probably a week or two later, Luther hammered the theses to the door of All Saints’ Church […]
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Leadership: Five Practices that Every Leader Needs
According to Daniel Montgomery and Jared Kennedy, effective leadership calls for the practice of five principles in the life of the leader:
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Church History: The Church Council that John Calvin Rejected
On October 23, 787, the last session took place of the last church council that brought together church leaders from both the eastern and western halves of what had once been the Roman Empire. Centuries later, one of the key Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century would reject what these church leaders decided. What brought church leaders […]
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Family Ministry: Caring for Your Pastor’s Children
Pastors’ children see the best and the worst of the church. My father served as a pastor throughout much of my childhood, and my oldest daughter spent her first several years in our household as a pastor’s child. Although I no longer serve as a paid pastoral staff member, I teach and preach frequently in […]
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Church History: How William Tyndale Changed the World
On October 6, 1536, William Tyndale was burned at the stake. He was only forty-two years old or so at the time, but the work he had already accomplished in those four decades of life would change the world. You’ve probably seen the bumper sticker: “If you can read, thank a teacher.” Another bumper sticker—or […]
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Family Ministry: Teaching Your Children How We Got the Bible
This week, 480 years ago, William Tyndale was strangled to death and then burned. One of his offenses was the translation of the Bible into English from Hebrew and Greek—a capital crime at that time. Not even death, however, could stop the impact of Tyndale’s translations. The words that Tyndale left behind would reshape not […]
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Leadership: “No, You Idiot, Your Team at Home …”
Dayton Moore, general manager of the Kansas City Royals, had a friend who asked him from time to time how his team was doing. Moore would begin talking about his baseball team and the friend would respond, “No, you idiot, … your team at home”—reminding Moore that his faithfulness as a husband and father mattered […]
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Giveaway: Win a Free How We Got the Bible Timeline
This week, 480 years ago, William Tyndale was executed and burned at the stake. Tyndale, perhaps more than any other individual, helped to make the Bible accessible to English-speaking people. And so, I’m giving away three timelines this week to help you to understand how we got the Bible! You’ll need a Twitter account and […]
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