True story. About a week after our “Easter is Coming” video went sort of viral – or perhaps I should say, “viral” for us 🙂 – the President of the seminary said to me, “So what are you going to do next?” Truth be told, we had no “next” in mind. But prompted by the implicit challenge in the question, Ben Cieslik and I went back to the drawing board and decided to experiment with how we might bring out a new dimension of Pentecost. This time we found inspiration from something Pete Rollins said: “We all have holes we want filled, but more times than not, God doesn’t just fill those holes, God makes them bigger.”...

Pentecost is almost upon us, falling this Sunday, May 19th. Celebrated on the fiftieth day after Easter, Pentecost is the day when the Holy Spirit was poured out onto the disciples and they were emboldened to go and proclaim the good news that Jesus was the Christ, the sure sign of God’s love for all people and the redemption of the world. For this reason, Pentecost is often described as the “birthday” of the Church. The Apostles first shared this message in Jerusalem, the location of the Temple and the city where Jesus had been crucified and raised again. They preached their first sermons as Jews gathered from all over the known world...

Today is Ascension Day. Truth be told, even though I did a podcast about preaching on Ascension Day two weeks ago, I almost forgot that. In fact, if I hadn’t called my parents today and heard them mention the Ascension Day retired pastors’ luncheon they’d gone to earlier, I’m pretty sure I would have forgotten about it all together. Ascension Day is one of the more overlooked holidays of the Christian calendar. It doesn’t fall on a Sunday; there are no disciplines of preparation ahead of time or rites of celebration on the day to usher it in. Fewer and fewer churches remember it, let alone hold Thursday services. It’s no...

…Then maybe it’s time to start Rethinking Evangelism! There’s an old joke that, while it names Lutherans, I suspect could be applied to most “mainline” Protestants and Roman Catholics: Q: What do you get when you cross a Lutheran with a Seventh Day Adventist?   A: Someone who goes door-to-door but has no idea what to say! There’s something both funny and just a little bit painful about that joke precisely because it’s true. Lutherans…and Presbyterians and Methodists and Episcopalians and Roman Catholics, as well…often are incredibly uncomfortable when we talk about evangelism largely because we assume that evangelism...

I found the following video fascinating. It’s not that the content is all that incredible – it’s essentially a simple retelling of the story of Jesus’ encounter with Mary and Martha followed by a brief interpretation of why this story is important to the narrator. Rather, it’s the very fact that a popular “secular” (not my favorite term, but…) author uses the story at all, let alone to good effect. Gretchen Rubin is the author of The Happiness Project and it’s follow-up Happier at Home, both of which are geared toward helping people discover and lay hold of practices that will make them – you guessed it – happier. On...