The pub nearest me has festooned itself with green, orange, and white bunting. My doctor’s waiting room is plastered with cardboard shamrocks that say LUCKY. McDonald’s has brought back (for a limited time) its Shamrock Shake. Yes, my friends, it’s almost St. Patrick’s Day, and since this year [2024] that falls on a Sunday, we…
Tailored vs. Traditional: Why Not Do Your Own Thing for Lent?
I’m busy planning out my personalized Lent. I need to decide what to give up. I need to decide what to give away. I need to pick books to read and do things that are tailored to my own personal, spiritual needs. Lent arrives soon. Am I ready? There are so many choices to make….
Have We Been Here Before? Gnosticism, Nationalism, and Neo-Paganism
“We’ve never been here before.” This is a sentiment I encounter frequently in other priests in the Anglican Church in North America. As churches throughout America shut their doors, culture perpetually changes, politics fray, tensions rise, and faith declines, I share the feeling. This current moment in the religious landscape of the secular West is…
3 Ways to Make Singleness a Win for the Gospel
The Church needs to see more Christians faithfully walking out lifetime singleness for the sake of the kingdom (AKA “celibacy”). That witness helps the Church grasp the hope of the gospel and begin living into the reality of the kingdom today. No witness to this hope is more moving than that of Christ himself. Jesus…
Why Collaborative Ministry? An Australian’s Story
In the early 2000’s, about four years into my ministry as an Anglican Priest, I started to seriously doubt my leadership capacities and probably came close to slipping into depression. I had been working in a series of financially struggling parishes with small congregations. Although I’d been given pretty good formation as a “minister of…
Sorry, Benedict, We Need an Augustine Option
Ever since the Mayflower set sail from England, the idea of escaping a corrupt world to build a godly society has been an ever-present strain in American religion. That impulse has led to more than a few schisms since the days of the Puritans, creating the multi-denominational, patchwork America that we know today. Rod Dreher’s…
The War on Advent
You have heard of the supposed War on Christmas. But the real war is not about whether retailers use the word Christmas during December or not. In fact, it is not even the Christmas season until Christmas day anyway. The real war is happening in many American churches. It’s not a war on Christmas, its…
3 Conservative Christian Heresies
In the conservative Christian movement, we hear and talk a lot about liberal or progressive heresies. But those heresies are the low-hanging fruit of theology. That is, it’s easy to point out that universalism, denying Christ’s divinity, re-writing sexual ethics to conform with popular whim, or turning the Bible into a secondary historic curiosity with…
Be the Church: Facing Nominalism
Recently, we were told that the Christian church in America is “hemorrhaging members” and that the church is shrinking. It is true that the number of Americans who claim to be Christian is shrinking. However, as usual, Ed Stetzer provides some real clarity in his interpretation of statistics. Turns out that people are not so much “leaving church” as they…
