Tag: Church

I enjoyed this podcast conversation with Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson: I especially liked the part of the discussion where they contrasted pastors with social media influencers. Many social media influencers are insulated from the “real world” implications of their content. Pastors deal with the messy details of people’s lives (or at least they should).…

Thankfully,we have an associate pastor so we do not run into the issue of what to do about the Eucharist when the pastor travels on a Lord’s Day. But before we had a larger pastoral staff, it was a dilemma for us. After going several years and struggling to find a pastor who could fill-in,…

[This is from October 2024.] A young man the other day told me he wanted to be a pastor and asked me what advice I had for him. Here’s a condensed version of what I passed along:

My article on the current Christian Nationalism movement was published by Theopolis. Here are some additional older notes I put together that cover some ground not covered in the Theopolis essay (some of this material has been posted to X; a few bits and pieces of it probably did make it into the Theopolis essay).…

Deaconesses are inescapable. Every healthy church has deaconesses, whether they call them that or not, whether the recognize them or not, whether they organize them as such or not. Every healthy church has older women who teach and counsel younger women, per Titus 2 – a ministry of women to women. Every healthy church has…

[A version of this article was published at 1819 News.] The passing of John MacArthur could be considered the end of an era in American evangelicalism. MacArthur’s public preaching ministry spanned over 50 years. He brought faithful Bible teaching to millions as his ministry grew from the local church, to radio and television, to the…

The adjective “pastoral” is an interesting one. What do we mean when we call a man “pastoral”? Most often today, “pastoral” seems to mean nice, soft, gentle, and most of all, winsome. But biblically, that’s not how pastors are described. It is true that pastors are called to be gentle and not quarrelsome. But it’s very…

I don’t think it’s helpful to think of preaching and Eucharist as in competition for the center of the worship service. They go together, as Doug Wilson says, like cooking and eating. The Word makes us hungry for the meal. The Word and Eucharist work together as inseparable aspects of covenant renewal. Each is incomplete without…