Church, seminary, future

Following on the recently exploded series of posts from around the blogosphere, some of us at The Purple Door were having a conversation yesterday.  Should young people avoid going to seminary now, if their degrees will ultimately be unmarketable and unhelpful in the pseudo-real world? 
My answer: maybe, maybe not.
There are (and always have been) [...]

Church, Money, Future . . . still going

In case you’ve missed the last two posts, there’s a good conversation going, and it’s snowballing.  More voices have been added, and I have it on good authority that there’s more coming.
For now, check out the contributions by:
Lindsay
Daniel So
Kevin Rains
It seems to me that these conversations are both new and old.  They’re new in the [...]

Church, Money, Future in the empire

Well now, we’ve got us a good conversation going . . .
Chris Marshall connects some of the dots between the financial crisis that seems to be hitting the U.S. and the degree to which that reality will affect pastors and the church. 
How will this impact churches and mortgages and credit lines that can’t be [...]

Book Review: The New Conspirators

I’ve been looking forward to reading this book ever since I heard it was coming out.  Tom Sine’s work has been widely cited for quite some time, and for good reason.  He’s smart, encouraging, witty, engaging, and kicks your butt, all at the same time.
There are aspects of The New Conspirators that will seem [...]

Marriage and Born Again Christians

The Barna organization just released some study stats on marriage and divorce.  There are a number of interesting aspects to this thing.  But I’ll pick two to highlight.
First, the study notes that of the 3792 adults surveyed, 33% had experienced a divorce.  Of these, “born again Christians” had a 32% likelihood of divorce, atheists or [...]

The Wacky Emerging Church: Reason #2.76

This post is part of a continuing series. You may want to read my list of disclaimers and intro remarks here, if you haven’t done so already.
Reason #2.76: The other white meat
Sad, but true, folks. White dudes with money are still pretty much in control. If you took a poll of emerging church [...]

The Wacky Emerging Church: Reason #14

This is the second entry in a continuing series. You may want to read my list of disclaimers and intro remarks here, if you haven’t done so already.
Reason #14: The new Kool-Aid still has that same funky aftertaste as the old kind.
I’ll start by saying that this reason doesn’t feature as prominently in the [...]

Charting the Emerging Church

So, there’s this chart floating around the blogosphere, developed by a guy I’ve never heard of, categorizing people into “orthodox” and not and “emerging” vs. “emergent,” blah blah blah.  I’ve not really looked carefully at either the chart, or the thought process behind it.  I doubt it’s helpful - even at first glance, it’s quite [...]

I didn’t give up blogging for Lent, I gave up being a Christian

Hi there!  It’s me, Steve.  You know, the guy who used to blog here, but hasn’t dropped in lately?  Yeah, that Steve.  Nice to, er, type at you again.
Busy week I suppose. Met with a couple different church planters, had a luncheon with other UW campus ministers, spent time with the inter::mission crew, and even [...]

Merry Christmas (I think)

Can’t say where this came from, but I’ve been walking through this whole Christmas season with a bit of an edge. People have heard me say cranky little quips, and even the occasional mini-rant. In part, it’s the consumerism of the season that a lot of people are cautious of. There are [...]