The Pentecostals and Charismatics are the weird cousins of the Christian denominational family. They’re the ones that go on about how important it is to be “baptized in the Holy Spirit” and preach “the full Gospel” while they get slain in the Spirit and hold Jericho marches. But you usually just end up praying they won’t start speaking in tongues at the family reunion this year. The fervor of the Pentecostals and Charismatics for their

The Golden Rule: Do to others what you would want them to do to you. For those whose childhood memories contain mornings spent in Sunday school, this moral rule is impossible to forget. Taught by Jesus in the first century, the Golden Rule has shaped the moral outlook of the Christian West for centuries. (After all, if God incarnate highlights one foundational moral rule, you should probably observe it.) The Golden Rule is simple, concise,

I grew up in a small, quiet, unnoticed town in Michigan. Tucked in a corner of that town, hidden in the hills and woods, is a small, quiet, unnoticed church. You probably wouldn’t find it unless you were looking for it or happened to live on the humble, residential road that hosts it. On a crowded Sunday, it might boast about fifty attendees. Compared with the mega-churches, the televised multimedia worship experiences, and the intrepid

For a long time, I was stalked by a pitiless enemy, an enemy I thought was my friend. This “friend” promised to give me much yet took much from me, always insatiably demanding more. No, it wasn’t a person. It was a dark entity, a ruthless specter. Appearing as an angel, this demon feasts on the souls of those unwitting victims taken in by its deception. For a long time, I was stalked by The

As I thought about writing this book review, I realized that I couldn’t write it as only a typical book review. Every so often books are published that represent significant paradigmatic evolution within a culture or discourse. Courtship in Crisis: The Case For Traditional Dating by Thomas Umstattd Jr. is one such book. I feel this post could reasonably be titled “How Courtship in Crisis Has Changed The Christian Matrimonial Discourse as We Know It.”