How to keep Millennials in the church? Let’s keep church un-cool
But a deeper problem is that Christianity has become too obsessed with how it is perceived. Just like the Photoshop-savvy Millennials she is so desperate to retain, the church is ever more meticulously concerned with her image, monitoring what people are saying about her and taking cues from that.
Why evangelicals’ push for immigration reform isn’t working
As it turns out, the evangelical movement on immigration has been mostly top-down and not bottom-up. It has failed to do the difficult work of convincing and mobilizing (or at least neutralizing) the millions of evangelical churchgoers and voters. As The New York Times reports, while “no prominent pastor has spoken out against the immigration (reform) effort … accord has been less broad among the faithful.”
I think we’ve inadvertently taken the parable and restricted the meaning of our “neighbor” in the other direction, thus doing the very thing Jesus is forbidding. We’ve come to think that our neighbor is only a person in extreme need — the person bleeding on the side of the road.
But what about the person who is not bleeding on the side of the road, but has other, much smaller but still very real needs?
The Ugley Vicar: ‘Flesh’ Beats ‘Sinful Nature’ for Clarity
As she was speaking, I had a sudden thought.
“The word Paul uses here,” I said, “is actually ‘flesh’. Now how long does flesh last?”
After a bit of thought, she replied, “Til you die.”
“And how long does spirit last?”
Again a bit of thought produced the answer, “Forever — for eternity.”
Stop Wishing You Were Bigger And Start Loving Like Jesus
Why are they worried about Sunday numbers? Could it be because that is what we have established as our barometer of church? Is your church growing, How are your Sunday a.m. numbers? Do we not recognize that we have created false human measuring sticks? So this church has an incredibly important ministry that is having great impact but instead of celebrating what God is doing they are trying to figure out ways to make them come on Sunday.
Counting Beans and a Sanctified People
So while numerical growth is desirable and commendable, it’s not the end goal. The goal must always be churches who learn to live as faithful and mature disciples of Jesus set apart for the glory of God (my appropriation of Paul’s stated goal).
The ghost in Bud Day’s obituary
There must be something I’m missing because I don’t understand the journalistic reason for obscuring, downplaying or downright ignoring the deceased’s religion in his or her obituary.
You are not responsible for trying to manage what other people think about your spouse or for trying to create false impressions before significant people.
You are responsible for managing yourself. You are responsible for managing how you function, how you react, and how you choose to relate to your spouse.
In the meantime, though, we are stuck with email, and need to learn to use it well. I have put a lot of time and thought into the best email practices and have identified 8 dumb email mistakes you may be making (which is to say, 8 dumb email mistakes I have found myself making). Many of these mistakes apply to everyone, though some apply primarily to those of us who tend to sit at a desk most of the day.
How Much Caffeine Is Actually in Your Coffee, From Dunkin’ to Starbucks
According to our super-scientific source, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (supplemented by stats from the much-less-official-sounding EnergyFiend.com), the milligrams of caffeine per ounce vary from chain to chain as wildly as the mood of someone hopped up on six cups from Mickey D’s.