What does it take to stand behind the pulpit at your church?
I’m wondering about the process of ordination at your church, or in your denomination. Are would-be ministers required to go through years of training and bureaucracy? Do they just have to sign a statement of faith and are then good to go? Whatever your [...]

I’m not a schoolteacher, but I’ve always imagined that teaching high school biology must be a bit like walking through a minefield: say the wrong thing about evolution here and outraged parents mob you; say the wrong thing about creation there and… angry parents mob you. It’s probably not quite that dramatic in real life, [...]

Let me get it off my chest, I love the TED talks.
This one is of Sir Ken Robinson talking about the topic, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”:

A few snippets from the talk:
There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the same way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? [...]

Is there a place for theological scholarship in the everyday life of a church community? Over at the Religion Dispatches blog, Jonathan Walton points to a widening gap between academic theologians and local churches. Ties between seminaries and denominations have become so weak that seminaries and the theologians who teach and publish at them are [...]

Why do so many 18-22 year-olds drop out of church after high school? Not for the reasons you might think. An upcoming book called Essential Church by Sam Rainer looks for the answers to that question, and the author has posted some of his findings at his blog—see his three myths about church dropouts.
The first [...]

Child sponsorship programs have been in place for a while now. So I imagine many of those children are now adults and have stories to tell about their experiences as a sponsored child. Our family has sponsored children for years, but we’ve never heard follow up stories.
Enter Michelle Tolentino, a former Compassion sponsored child. She [...]

Leaving Eden is a blog by an “undercover atheist” attending Wheaton College. It’s an interesting look at what it’s like to be in the extreme ideological minority in a Christian environment, and has some good posts challenging Christians to be more respectful in the way they talk to and about atheists. There’s an interview with [...]

The state of Alabama has picked a Bible textbook for state public schools. The book they’ve chosen is The Bible and its Influence, a publication of the Bible Literacy Project. I believe we talked about this here when the idea was first being floated—a book about the Bible for students, designed to satisfy both sides [...]

Are secular colleges risky for Christians? A new study suggests otherwise.

Mark Galli in Christianity Today has an article on The Cost of Christian Education that questions the way we teach children about faith. Galli, drawing on an essay by Debra Dean Murphy, writes about how educational programs traditionally designed by the church are inadequate to fully teach children how to be Christians.
Murphy argues that [...]