At the risk of putting words into peoples’ mouths, this morning after church one of the worship leaders was speaking with me about chord structure, and the she started say, “There’s only 7 notes in the scale…” and then we got interrupted. I think I know where she was going with this. It’s the argument that all the possible songs have been written. While I disagree with that premise, I think it’s more accurate that God is writing new songs on the hearts of people that have a style that is unique to these times. There is a certain freshness about them, and congregations recognize this and their ..read more

In our part of the world MAiD or MAID refers to “Medical Assistance in Dying.” It possibly goes by a different name where you live. Over the past few years I’ve been increasingly sharing my blog platform here, and especially at our sister blog with Ruth who is now an ordained pastor in a longstanding Canadian denomination. When she told me about this project, I offered to make it available to our audience here as well. Note that this is much longer than regular articles that appear on this site. by Ruth Wilkinson I have a friend who works at a hospice — a medical facility dedicated to the care ..read more

Review: Life is Hard. God is Good. Let’s Dance. by Brant Hansen The elephant in the room is that I am at an age, and have tracked enough years in Christian life and service where I should be reading and reviewing serious authors, right? I’ll own that. Looking back over the books reviewed here, which occupy seven shelves of an Ikea bookshelf, there are things that, working in Christian book marketing as I did, seemed so important and relevant then and seem completely frivolous and unimportant now. And there are also places on those bookshelves that I wish were occupied with other more phil ..read more

Has it really been eight weeks since I posted anything here? I thought you might like a short personal update. First of all, even though I don’t post much here anymore, I’m delighted — and somewhat amazed — to report that last weekend our affiliate blog, Christianity 201 marked 5,000 consecutive daily posts; some of which I wrote, and others of which were begged, borrowed or… (well, you know how that phrase ends). That includes weekends, holidays, and… (okay, now I run the risk of boasting). What I greatly appreciate about having this body of devotionals is that now I can do topical searches o ..read more

Review: What if Jesus was Serious about Heaven by Skye Jethani Having reviewed two previous books in this series here and here, I’m no stranger to the format, and perhaps that is why I found the use of short 3-page chapters and “napkin doodle” illustrations especially effective in this fourth book in the series. For those of us who grew up in church, Heaven is something we were told about, but as our capacities for theological understanding grew with age, we often had to unlearn some aspects of things and go through a process of relearning. The game changer for me was the 530-page book Heaven ..read more

About three years ago, the church where my wife was working graciously decided to rent their auditorium to another church. From the outset, one of the glaring differences was that this other church was complementarian, and the church employing her was egalitarian. But her church had always held — rightly or wrongly — to an 11:00 AM start time, and the other church was willing to meet at 8:55. So the relationship began. I should also add that both of the churches use the term “Baptist” in their name, or did until the other church underwent a name change a few weeks ago. (To make matters worse ..read more

This is neither new or newsworthy in 2023, but it is a recurring subject, and having taken the time to write this for a Facebook comment I thought I would share it here as well. The FB post itself was prompted by a recent post by Bill Mounce at Zondervan Academic. As someone who engages with Bible publishing and Bible marketing, the challenge with The Passion Translation (TPT) is largely not being able to determine where the text ends and the commentary begins. My understanding is that this was the primary reason Bible Gateway removed TPT from the site. With a study Bible (any one of many) the ..read more

A review of God on Mute: Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer by Pete Greig (Zondervan). I’m still blessed with being able to request books from time to time, but with this one, I made it clear that I might not do a review. This book, on unanswered prayer, was for me; something personal I needed to read right now. Also, it’s an older book, at least in book review terms, published way back in 2020. Almost ancient. But one author leads to another — if you allow that to take place — and so just as through John Mark Comer we were introduced to Tyler Station, so with Tyler we’ve been introduce ..read more

A March 11 article in the Saturday Star (Toronto) was discussing the effect that working from home has had on the workplace, particularly among recent hires who haven’t spent a lot of time in the office or interacting with their co-workers beyond voice calls or Zoom meetings. It’s becoming a problem. The solutions “involve newer staff coming into the office more often, but not randomly; they’re not going to just pick up the culture and work habits of a company by osmosis, especially given that more experienced staff won’t be coming as often as junior staff.” Interesting. I thought of the ..read more

According to Twitter, today marks 10 years since I signed up for the platform. That’s not nearly as long as many whom I follow, but longer than others. They provided a tweet with a graphic image that I could use to mark the occasion, but it was rather dumb so I passed. I see Twitter more as an opportunity than anything else. An opportunity to engage with people I really respect. Given the choice between Facebook and Twitter, and told I can only keep one, Facebook would be gone in a heartbeat. But to fully express my appreciation, we have to go back and talk about email. Do you ever read the na ..read more