• 6 Minute Read Baby Jesus Meek and Mild // Pray for me an Orphan Child // Be my strength, be my friend // Be with me until the end Perhaps you remember this prayer from childhood that kids would say around Christmas time. Well, kids… buckle up…because this post is all about the …
10 Years Ago, I Embraced Nonviolence & Anabaptism
• 4 Minute Read In the past month or so, I’ve been interviewed on two different podcasts. Bros, Bible’s, & Beer: This was fun. Three great guys who talk about faith from three different angles. One is closer to where I’d be at when it comes to theology. Another is more in the conservative-evangelical …
Romans 13 Doesn’t Give Government an Ethical Blank Check
• 6 Minute Read Kurt Note: I wrote this originally as an FB post. It got long. Here it is in its original form (so it is a tad raw): Romans 13 cannot and must not be used to give government structures a blank ethical check. I have much to say, but lets start …
Does God plan everything that happens? (4 Views)
• 9 Minute Read A couple of weeks ago, I introduced you to my friend Bonnie Kristian. She is the author of A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today. Her guest post (“What happens to people who never hear about Jesus?”) was so well received that I asked if she’d be up to …
What happens to people who never hear about Jesus? (4 Views)
• 7 Minute Read Is it fair for God to treat people who have honestly never heard this stuff the same way he treats people who knowingly reject him? Is ignorance as bad as an intentional embrace of evil? Christians have historically answered these questions three ways, positing theories that are today called exclusivism, inclusivism, and postmortem evangelism.
Cosmic Signs Don’t Signal a Rapture (Another Prediction by David Meade)
• 5 Minute Read I thought you might want to know that the rapture is set to occur on April 23rd. According to Christian Numerologist David Meade, we all need to be ready. <<<By the way, this reflection is based on podcast episode #4 from, Rapture Drill: Reframing Revelation, the End Times, & Our Weird …
Revelation’s climactic verse is dirty & powerful (how to avoid spiritual STDs)
• 3 Minute Read I grew up around charts. Big. Scary. Charts. Can you relate? And on these charts were several pictures accompanied by verse labels and a timeline. Oh, yeah, gotta have the timeline figured out. These always came with the acknowledgement that no one could truly know the day or the hour. …
Let’s bring the soul back to biblical scholarship
• 2 Minute Read Recently I had a unique opportunity. I was asked, by members of the Comparative Religion M.A. cohort at the University of Washington, to lead a conversation on being a pastor who is also an aspiring scholar. Most of them were not Christian in any sense of the word. And yet, …
The Poisonwood Bible and Me
• 4 Minute Read The Mark of a Good Book If you asked me to recommend a theology book, it is quite probable that I will emphatically ask: “Have you read Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace? No? You HAVE to. It’s a game changer!” So emphatic is this answer that I wrote a previous …
Name Change Myth: Saul Never Became Paul
• 4 Minute Read Today, I have something that may be a huge paradigm shift for you. You’ve heard the story: Saul became Paul. It is a powerful story. A Jewish man once hell-bent on the destruction of Christianity became convinced that his life was nothing without Christ. The name change from Saul (old …
We Are Going Somewhere: A Progressive Theology
• 6 Minute Read Theology can be a beautiful thing. The ideas that we hold about God shape how we view the world we live in and our places within it. It can give us hope when things begin to go dark. Theology can also be toxic. Our ideas about God can harden our hearts …
Shame Disrupts Shalom: Voices that Pull Us Away from God and Others
• 4 Minute Read The Bible has this grand story it tells, a grand narrative that proclaims a Creator God that loves creation. Humans, whom this God deems as bearing the image of the Divine, are the pinnacle of God’s creative process. They are designed to be God’s representatives on the earth. This is …
Decluttering Jesus: Refusing to Give Shame the Last Word
• 3 Minute Read As a pastor, I encounter wonderful people on a regular basis. Many of these folks, often interested in God or committed followers of Jesus, have inherited harmful narratives about Jesus. Because of this, shame often gets the final word when it comes to part of their identity. Whether we like …
How (Not) to Deconstruct Hell (and a quote from N.T. Wright)
• 3 Minute Read As I often do, I find myself circling back to a subject that has been a matter of deconstruction in the past: HELL Yep, H-E-Double-Hockey… it is an an issue that many of us continue to wrestle with. Now, there are two approaches to deconstructing hell. 2 Approaches to Deconstructing …
Jesus’ Radical Kingdom Reformation within Judaism (and some stuff about The Reformation)
• 7 Minute Read ust like Luther, and the later reformers 500 years ago, the message of Jesus upset the gatekeepers of religious boundaries.
Whenever this happens, the gatekeepers must decide if they are going to tear down the arbitrary gates and redefine who is “in.” Or will they resist as though the movement of God is limited by human boundaries?