Every Christmas season there is an increase in the number of people who ask me about Jesus and the Bible. This is partly because Christmas brings a non-church going crowd into church, and it is partly because hurts, stresses and anxieties have a way of increasing in this season. One of the most common questions I am asked goes something like this: “Can we really … Continue reading Christmas And The Canon: Can We Trust The Stories We Read?

  My wife, Angela, and I have the great privilege to speak at FamilyLife’s Weekend to Remember® marriage getaways. Many of the couples who come to these events have healthy marriages and are just attending for encouragement or a tune-up. But we’ve also observed another trend: At each getaway, we have noticed that there are always people who don’t want to be there. In this … Continue reading What’s the Real Problem in Your Marriage?

Almost ten years ago, we experienced one of the greatest joys of our life in the birth of our first child, Turner. Five weeks later we experienced one of the greatest lows of our life in the words “It’s cancer.” A softball size tumor was discovered in Angela’s colon that, according to the doctor, was just weeks away from spreading. Today is a special day … Continue reading 7 Lessons We Learned From Cancer

Angela and I have had the opportunity to live in post-Christian Europe, the Bible Belt South and the melting pot that is Florida. For all their cultural differences, we have noticed that wherever we go people tend to define sin the same way. Just last week we were speaking at a conference in Sacramento, CA (far from the Bible Belt) and we saw it again. … Continue reading The Insanity of Sin

I have been doing ministry in college towns since I was a student at FSU. Each year, I meet students who have had genuine life change and one of the questions they often ask is should they be baptized. Now, this was an easier issue when we lived overseas, but in the US many of these students have already been baptized in some way. So, … Continue reading Should I Be (Re)Baptized? 

On October 31 we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The day Martin Luther made his 95 theses public. In the coming weeks churches will preach the solas, historians will argue over over whether he actually nailed the 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle and my friends in Italy (where we lived for five years) will likely wonder what the big … Continue reading What Was Luther’s ‘Breakthrough’?

I recently heard a well known pastor talking about how we need to do away with the parachurch. He was specifically talking about the need to replace the campus ministries at his local university with an in-house church ministry reaching students. His reasoning? This kind of organized outreach is the responsibility of the local church. It struck me as odd, though, that at the same … Continue reading A Plea For The Parachurch