Christian Living, Biblical Studies, Religion, Spiritual Growth, Theology
John Beeson
The Faith of Unbelief

Bart Ehrman has perhaps done more to undermine the credibility of the Bible than anyone else in my lifetime. But his story didn’t begin that way. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and skeptic. Ehrman grew up in a Christian home, attended a conservative Bible school, and then found his way to a liberal seminary where his faith in the God of the Bible unraveled. That seminary happens to be the seminary I would attend a couple of decades later.

For Ehrman, everywhere he looks he sees holes in the biblical story. The inconsistencies that he sees have led him to determine that he cannot trust in the God of the Bible.

The Faith of Unbelief
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Don't Numb Your Feelings

“Don’t listen to your feelings; remember what Jesus did for you!”

“Don’t be guided by your feelings; listen to what God commands you to do!”

In just the past week, I heard both of these warnings. Two very different Christian speakers urged their audiences to shut down their feelings. These admonitions resonate. They contain truth. It is correct that our feelings don’t override truth, nor do our emotions negate what God has done. Neither do our feelings give us an out for what God commands us to do.

Don't Numb Your Feelings
History, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.

Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.

Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from

Lord, Reach Your Justice Down
Culture, Generosity, Nature, Relationships
John Beeson
Marshmallows and Friends

Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.

The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.

Marshmallows and Friends
Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Uprooting Our Political Identity

Happy election day!

In 2016, data scientists Eitan Hersh and Yair Ghitza analyzed data among registered voters to determine how often Democrats and Republicans married. They learned that 9% of marriages had the spouses registered in the two parties. Over the next four years that meager number would drop precipitously, down to 4%.

 As Jonathan Haidt and others have successfully argued, the ideological disparity between FOX News and CNBC are child’s play compared to the engineered social media algorithms that create hermetically sealed echo chambers for our political views.

Uprooting Our Political Identity

church attendance

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Don’t Let the Culture War Steal Your Joy: Trevin Wax reflects, “The worrisome quality I find in much of today’s cultural commentary is the absence of joy. It’s as if our souls have shriveled until all that remains is a sense of hopelessness, a quiet resignation that assumes the church cannot thrive in this strange new world.”

  2. Holiness is Transgressive: Brett McCracken’s post sizzles. I love this, “’Transgression’ in contemporary pop culture has become ubiquitous to the point of banality…it’s all so pervasive by now that it’s tiresome, as “transgressive” as the khaki section of Old Navy.”

  3. Church Attendance Drops Among Young, Liberals, and Singles: Christianity Today reports, “Before the pandemic, 75 percent of Americans reported attending religious services at least monthly. By spring 2022, that figure dropped to 68 percent attending at least monthly.”

  4. I Want Him Back (But Not the Old Me Back): Tim Challies on sanctification and the death of his son, “I want Nick back. But I don’t want my old self back. I so badly wish that my son could be part of my life again. But I would so badly hate to lose all the precious ways in which God has been real to me and true to me and present with me in my sorrows.”

  5. Travel Photographer of the Year: If you enjoy photography, make sure you scroll through all of these. The elephant and the lion looking through the buffalo pics are particularly stunning.

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How to Get Your Teenager to Want to Go to Church

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How to Get Your Teenager to Want to Go to Church

Every other Sunday I pick up my twelve-year-old nephew at 6:30am. He piles into the car alongside my fifteen-year-old son and seventeen-year-old daughter. What could possibly drag these three students out of bed at such an hour? They serve on the tech team at New Life.

Do I have to cajole them? Beg them? Bribe them? Nope.

After we get back from a long Sunday morning, we’ll enjoy a late lunch, some time of recuperation, and then they’ll be headed back out of the house at 4:30 pm for our Student Ministry, where they will play on the worship team. They’ll also insist on going to the tech team hangout Monday night and they will be at church Thursday night for worship and tech team practice. They’ll do it all with joy.

Studies show us the challenge it is to keep young adults engaged in church following their high school graduation.[i] 66% of 18-22 year-olds who regularly attended church during high school dropped out for at least a year during those transitional years. How can we do a better job of launching teens into a commitment to Christ and his church following high school?

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. 11 Things You Might Think are in the Bible, But Really Aren’t: #11 is particularly insidious.

2. Bible Reading and Church Attendance Drops During COVID-19: Barna just released a report that confirms what I’ve been hearing anecdotally: many are spiritually floundering during this season. The reality is that 2020 has just sped up the decline in basic spiritual disciplines.

3. Let Bible Reading Get Back to Basics: To that end, Jen Wilkin suggests five basic tools that can assist your Bible reading. I particularly appreciate her suggestion to keep a Bible timeline.

4. Christian, You Are Able Not to Sin: Zach Howard turns to Augustine for advice when we enter this familiar place, “Sinning as a saint can cause two opposite (and equally) wrong reactions. On the one hand, we can respond with prideful presumption in our power to overcome sin. On the other hand, we can react with helpless despair in the face of our persistent sin.”

5. Were the Gospels Meant to be Taken as Historical Narrative? Do the gospels fail the test of providing historical attestation? Timothy Paul Jones responds to to Reza Aslan's accusation that the gospels, "are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events they describe."

6. Iceland: The Land of Fire and Ice: Who wants to take a trip with me?!

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.       When Life Gets Tough Self-Esteem Is Not the Answer: Shelby Abbott reminds us of a simple but important truth: " When we’re able to have a proper view of ourselves along with an honest view about the sinful state of the world, the solution to our rampant anxiety becomes more and more clear—it is not more self-esteem, self-trust, or self-love. The solution is God Almighty made known to us in the person of Jesus Christ."

2.      Surprisingly, Millennials are the Generation Most Likely to Attend Church: Aaron Earls reports on this surprising study: " A study commissioned by Dunham+Company found more than half of self-identified evangelicals say they attend church once a week or more. Among millennials, however, that number climbs to 61%—more than Gen Xers (44%) and Boomers (54%)."

3.      How we Can be Selfless without Being Needless: Caroline Saunders makes a helpful distinction in this article about the difference between being selfless and being needless. She suggests we ought to be the first but not the second. " Our neediness is also an instrument for God’s work through us. Our personal neediness can train us to see neediness in others. The surprising result? Selflessness!"

4.      10 Ways to Spoil an Apology: Emma Scrivener reminds us of just how easy it is to blow an apology. 

5.      The Problem With Banning Plastic Bags: Everyone knows plastic bags are bad for the environment. But what if banning them is worse?

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Why Doesn't My Neighbor Go to Church?

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Why Doesn't My Neighbor Go to Church?

There was a time when going to church is what respectable people did. Two generations ago, every self-respecting citizen went to church, regardless of their desire to be there or not. When I was in middle school our family became acquaintances with someone at church. My parents ended up doing business with him only to learn later that he was far from ethical in his business dealings. Church, it turned out, was just a handy place for him to expand his business.

Long gone are the days of expected church attendance. And good riddance to them. I have no desire to have our society return to “the good old days” of church attendance insofar as that is merely moral behavior. What I long for are people to yearn for an encounter with a holy and loving God and to experience the warmth of God’s family.

A recent survey asked people why they do and don’t attend church. Those who attend cited reasons such as “to get closer to God,” “because I find the sermons valuable,” and “to be part of a faith community” as some of their answers. Those who don’t attend listed these as their top reasons for not attending:

1.       I practice my faith in other ways

2.       I am not a believer

3.       I haven’t found a church I like

4.       I don’t like the sermons

5.       I don’t feel welcome

That’s a helpful glimpse into the heart of the non-church attender. You might notice that four of the five reasons don’t have anything to do with their beliefs. That means that the most significant objection you might fear from your neighbor (disagreeing with your faith) is unlikely to be the main reason they aren’t attending.

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