One of our recent polls asked for your general thoughts about online church.  The vast majority of you said you’d like online church to disappear from our culture just like hypercolor t-shirts.  It’s an argument I understand.  There is a lot of debate on whether online community is as genuine as in person relationships.
And good [...]

The best selling book of 1955 was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. I recently read parts of the book as part of some research I was doing on that era. There are a lot of things about Peale’s version of Christianity that troubled me, and here is one example:
Just as there exist [...]

Rolling Hills Baptist Church in Fayetteville, GA has received a lot of press lately for the decision to sell its brand new building and use the money to take care of those in need in the community. The $1.4 million dollar new facility is nearly paid off, but the congregation overwhelmingly voted to put the [...]

Joel Rubinson says that, in this down economy, businesses should focus on being a friend to people. People feel the recession is a crisis much like a natural disaster or epidemic. Uncertainty and anxiety reign.
Smart businesses, therefore, will position themselves as friends and neighbors who are there to help. He cites Hyundai’s offer to take [...]

(Quick Thought is a new feature, providing a quick post for you to respond to with your first reactions and thoughts.  The goal is to keep comments short, too.  Maybe a couple sentences but no more than 100 words or so.  Let’s see where the conversation goes!)
“Pre-existing conditions accepted.”
I saw that on a spam fax [...]

At first I shook my head.  Then I started to laugh.  Finally a co-worker helped me realize he’s evangelizing to someone who is already a believer.
Stick with the whole thing (it gets good about a minute in) and share your thoughts.
(Thanks to Matthew Paul Turner for originally posting this on his blog.)

The Pew Forum recently published a survey on why people change religions from the tradition in which they were raised as a child. They have a handy interactive graph that shows why people switch to and from and in between traditions.
But I’m particularly interested in why people who were raised as protestants leave protestantism. I’m [...]

1998: Korn Rocks
I’ve never been a big Korn fan, but metal music is a guilty pleasure. Over a decade ago, a high-school student near my hometown was suspended for wearing a T-shirt featuring logos of the metal band Korn. It’s a fairly rural, conservative, religious, family-oriented community—the kind of place metal music tries hard to [...]

I just had an inquiry from the Religion Editor at a major American weekly news magazine. She wants to know our take on the phrase “followers of Jesus,” particularly as an alternative to the term “Christian.” 
I see it on Facebook regularly, when some of my Christian friends describe their religious affiliation with a variety of terms that [...]

You’ve probably heard of the famed magic duo Penn and Teller.  If you know them well, then you understand that Penn Jillette, the one that talks, is a big time atheist.  Phil Cooke had this video on his blog where Penn is talking about a recent experience where a Christian gave him a copy of [...]