Renewing Purpose

Should you read this newsletter?

I love seeing people in person. And after a year of mandated Zoom meetings, who wants to attend another virtual conference? How about an after-work Zoom party? Any interest in celebrating a live-strea

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9/11 and the Gift of Gratitude

It took 20 years after the 9/11 attacks to realize how much of this tragedy I had simply blocked from my mind. The overwhelming barbarity and evil of these terrorist attacks was more than I could pay

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Who are your enemies?

I remember sitting in a dull, dingy classroom with about thirty people to learn about Muslims and Islam. It was a careful, respectful, and thoughtful experience. So I’m sad to tell you that I’ve forgo

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Why is Christianity so disappointing?

What’s not to like about Christianity? Eternal life. Forgiveness of sins. Love poured into your heart by the Holy Spirit. A free gift received by faith. Jesus willingly gave his life to save us from o

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Distracted by Excellence

We live in a culture that habitually, even casually, assumes that excellence is a noble and worthy value. The famous CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, told us, “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, a

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All for Jesus

There’s a very simple message at the heart of the Christian message: by faith in Christ, be transformed by the love of God into a new creation. Then, by the renewing love of the Holy Spirit, we love G

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The Challenge of Revelation

As an apologist and a philosopher, my default approach to the complexity of religious (and a-religious) ideas is to listen, to think, to reason, and then, as best I can, to draw logical conclusions. B

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Christmas and the Birth of Hope

In the midst of the cheerful season of Christmas, The New York Times recently surprised again, this time with some powerfully nihilistic writing. The article, by Roy Scranton, is gloomily titled, “We’

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What is the power of your life? How far does your influence go? As it turns out, the impact of our lives is far more than you might imagine. Give yourself a baseline: take the next five seconds and wr

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From the start of humanity, we have found ways to separate ourselves from God and one another. From Adam and Eve rejecting God, to Cain murdering his brother Abel, we have had a rocky start to stickin

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Books For A New Apologist

I want to recommend some books for starting an apologetics library. These books are accessible to a motivated high school student (and middle schooler), but also respect the intelligence of adult read

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This is a book about spiritual dynamics. Effective spiritual ministry flows out of being, and God is concerned with our being. He is forming it. The patterns and processes He uses to shape us are wort

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Context matters. For instance, if you’re lying in a dark place and a strong man flashes a knife above your chest before plunging it down into your body, it makes a difference whether you are in a hosp

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For many Christians, the idea of spiritual disciplines or spiritual formation has become an abstraction, something vague, or a set of pietistic rituals. Whether it is prayer or Bible reading or fastin

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In my last post, Two Common Evangelism Mistakes, I talked about two ways Christians often get evangelism wrong. You can… Present the wrong message. Live like you don’t believe a word you are saying. I

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Don’t you sometimes wish that life came with a giant eraser that you could use to get rid of really big mistakes? This would be nice even when you order dessert and then realize about an hour later, o

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Have you been studying apologetics for a while? Perhaps you’ve read Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig and dug into a few books by C.S. Lewis. Armed with this new and exciting knowledge, you’re fi

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Five Challenges For Your Secular Friends

Do you feel like you’re always on the defensive about Christianity? There’s the Crusades, Westboro is probably inappropriately protesting something, and a prominent Christian leader has likely said so

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Are you tired of trying to define yourself? There is enormous pressure to define yourself well. What is your personal brand on social media? Or are you simply invisible and irrelevant to the global, h

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Have you ever heard of experiential learning? From ropes courses to trust falls, or hearing a ‘what is the meaning of life?’ talk while standing in a cemetery, the point of experiential learning exerc

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Do you ever feel overwhelmed about defending the truth of Christianity? It seems like there’s a lot of information to remember! Philosophy is complicated. Sometimes apologetics feels like math (with a

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Do you love your skeptical neighbors? Its a question I don’t hear very often, but one that Christians need to regularly ask one another. According to some studies, up to 20% of Americans are not relig

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As a Christian, I have been the recipient of some really bad attempts at evangelism. One of the most puzzling was a fairly long airplane ride. I don’t recall talking to the person next to me at all –

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Books for Skeptics and Seekers

Do you ever feel like you have to have all the answers for your skeptical friends? Here’s the problem: it is way, way easier to ask a hard question than to give a good answer. In the space of five min

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In this post I am going to teach you a process that will let you answer your friends’ questions. Seriously. You can do this. Before we begin, though, we need to recognize a more general point. Wheneve

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On February 1, Purdue University, in partnership with Biola University, hosted a debate between Dr. Alex Rosenberg and Dr. William Lane Craig, on the topic “Is Faith in God Reasonable?” You can alread

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Who doesn’t want to be part of an exciting, growing, and large church? The greater the desire for a bigger and better church, the more important church growth strategies are. The motivation from this

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How do we love our friends on Facebook? It is a new tool, so I’m not sure we have the answers we need to this important question. But with over a billion users, when Christians participate on Facebook

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The Apostle Paul led an amazing life. It seems that everything he did somehow advanced the gospel. Even when he persecuted the church, dragging men and women into prison, and oversaw the martyrdom of

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Christians seem to have a poor reputation for answering questions. Would you like to know why people don’t listen to our answers? And do you want some ideas for changing this situation? Then this post

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Our voices can, obviously, be used to communicate. But did you know that, under the right conditions, the sound waves of the human voice are powerful enough to break glass? Though this was once though

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Whatever their worldview, everyone has doubts. Christians are no different. Given this pervasive experience, every local church needs to acknowledge the reality of doubt. In preparing to respond to do

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“A Collision with God” is a sermon on Mark 10:35-45, given on June 24th, 2012, at a regional worship gathering for Church of the Cross in Boston, MA. You are welcome to give this sermon in other conte

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When we are hurt by someone, one of the most fundamental temptations is to react with anger and a determination to strike back. Whether they have been insensitive, mean, violent, or disrespectful, we

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