You don’t have to eat hummus

‘The notion of cosy suburban living has been sold to us by everything from TV sitcoms to the lifestyle pages of the newspapers and as Christians we’ve generally accepted this norm without ever challenging it. We’ve assumed that Christians will be upwardly mobile but we’ve not unpacked how fundamentally unpleasant that term is. As a result, we’ve got a generation of Christians like me who would struggle to fit back into the communities that we emerged from, while large tracts of our towns and cities with no evangelical witness.’

The death of beauty

David Robertson talks about the importance of beauty and how it acts as a good apologetic for the gospel.

A cancel culture nightmare

‘This episode is one of the most thorough and illuminating examples I’ve ever seen of just how dysfunctional discourse is when it’s conditioned by technology like Twitter. Every single player in this story looks bad.’

Who is Yahweh?

Seems an important one to answer. John Piper offers his.

Why did the Pharisees hate Jesus so much?

Given how many people who aren’t Christians still claim to admire Jesus, it’s worth asking why the Pharisees didn’t share the view. Here is RC Sproul’s answer.

Dear church – don’t overlook and undervalue the elderly

This is a really important one. ‘In the church planting world, many young church leaders put a great deal of emphasis on attracting millennials and specific demographics that do not have gray hair or need assistance getting from their car into the building on the Lord’s Day without stumbling. When a church overlooks the elderly, it can cause several big problems within the church family.’

From the archive: Recovering the primacy of the church – what about theological education?

‘The Lord has given the church the responsibility to make and train disciples of Jesus Christ. It, therefore, seems like a shirking of that responsibility to simply farm it out to third-parties with whom there is no formal association or recognition. Just as missionaries are sent abroad at the behest of commissioning churches in a formal partnership whereby the church and worker are together seeking to engage in world mission, shouldn’t those serving in theological education similarly be sent by churches in formal partnership together seeking to raise up the next generation of church leaders, evangelists and missionaries? It strikes me the easiest way to do this is to consider theological colleges as akin to mission agencies and their workers as those sent or commissioned by the church for their roles.’