When Helping Hurts
In 2006 Americans spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.6 billion on short-term missions. Some 2.2 million Americans were involved in one of these trips, up from just 120,000 two decades before. Such mission work has very nearly become a rite of passage for young American Christians.
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There has been a movement within the last few years to develop single-campus churches into multiple sites. To accomplish this, there may be a video feed from the main campus to other campuses, or a pre-recorded message broadcast, or even a teaching team sharing the teaching in the various campuses.
He appears when least expected but most needed. Usually dressed in blue jeans, sandals, and an old t-shirt, the white-haired sage is a mystery to the small Orange Beach, AL community. The most anyone really knows about him is his name. "My name is Jones. No 'Mr.' Just plain Jones," is his customary reply.
In 2006 Americans spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.6 billion on short-term missions. Some 2.2 million Americans were involved in one of these trips, up from just 120,000 two decades before. Such mission work has very nearly become a rite of passage for young American Christians.
"Who do people say that I am?" It's interesting that Jesus didn't start off by asking the disciples the personal question that would follow ("Who do you say that I am?"). He first asked them what other people were saying. The views of Jesus were varied in the first century. They are even more so today.
Do you want to see the greatest evidence of the love of God? Go to the cross. Do you want to see the greatest evidence of the justice of God? Go to the cross. It is where wrath and mercy meet. Holiness and peace kiss each other. The climax of redemptive history is the cross. So says D.A. Carson, research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, in his new book, Scandalous: The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus.
Early in George Orwell's iconic 1984 is a particularly haunting scene. Winston, the hero of the story, is confessing to his diary a sexual encounter with a prostitute.
Who was the man who wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, and what shaped him? Those are the questions that Kevin Belmonte seeks to answer in his new biography of John Bunyan. This book is one of many in Thomas Nelson's "Christian Encounters" series.
I read recently of a researcher who wanted to study the effects of pornography on young adult males. He carefully built the structure for the study, determining how he would compare young men who had experienced pornography with a control group comprised of those who had never come into contact it. Tragically this researcher had to cancel his study. He found that he was unable to put together a control group; he could not find young men who had not discovered pornography. The experiment was impossible to conduct.
