I have seen the story unfold so many times I could tell it in my sleep. A young pastor walks into established church and tries to change the church’s structure and culture on the first day. Instead of getting to know the people, the culture, and his neighbors, he goes full bore after a checklist…
Today — January 11, 2016 — John Piper turns 70. I ‘met’ John Piper in 2000 when I was 19 years old and my summer mission trip leader had us read The Pleasures of God together. I was transfixed, and transformed. Never had I encountered such an explicitly God-centered worldview or such compellingly clear theological…
The best approach for a pastor when entering a dysfunctional, dying congregation is to simply be a pastor to those people.
Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from “The Five Pillars of the Insiders: A Collective Response to Understanding Insider Movements.” The entire response is available at the blog of the Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam. The long-awaited volume Understanding Insider Movements has finally been released. It defines an “insider” as “a person…
It was the first of March, 1985. I remember where I was sitting when it happened. I was pastor of a church in the western suburbs of Chicago. A guest preacher was speaking at a series of meetings at our church. He was teaching on the prayers of the apostle Paul found in his New…
One of the great privileges we have at Southern Seminary is the opportunity to hear God’s word proclaimed from some of the top evangelical scholars, pastors, and leaders in our bi-weekly chapel service. Thankfully, you don’t have to be on campus to be a beneficiary of this blessing. Every week during the semester, our chapel services…
The birth of Christ was the decisive turning point in the salvation history, ushering in the multi-ethnic gospel community called the church.
Video continues to be one of the fastest growing forms of content on the internet. While the power of video has long been realized, the opportunity to share these stories with a wide audience is still a relatively new phenomenon. At Southern Seminary, we believe that video continues to be one of the most powerful…
At the end of another year we want to pause and thank you for taking the time to read The Southern Blog. Our prayer is that content produced would equip you for more faithful service. This year saw a new record for pageviews on Southern Blog content as well as the most read post in…
Many of us struggle to make conversation at Christmas gatherings, whether church events, work-related parties, neighborhood drop-ins, or annual family occasions. Sometimes our difficulty lies in having to chat with people we rarely see or have never met. At other times we simply don’t know what to say to those with whom we feel little…
In any conversation between a Christian and a Muslim, one of the first disputed topics is the authenticity of the Bible. Usually Christians are told they have a falsified or corrupted Bible, or that the Bible they possess today is not actually the authentic and inspired text—it was altered and replaced by a forged one.…
“There cannot be a surer rule, nor a stronger exhortation to the observance of it, than when we are taught that all the endowments which we possess are divine deposits entrusted to us for the very purpose of being distributed for the good of our neighbor.” — John Calvin Even if you haven’t looked at a…
We all have those TV shows that define our childhood – shows that captured our little minds and imaginations. For me, it was Sesame Street (don’t laugh; some of you watched Barney), Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and Dukes of Hazzard. While I have no interest in these shows now, I look upon them with a sense…
When the next Star Wars movie comes out, go to a showing and talk to 20 people standing in line. You’ll hear 20 different stories about the first time they saw the movies — one a 12-year-old with his brother, another a 7-year-old at the cinema for the first time, another a ’90s kid watching…
I miss the traditional Thanksgiving hymns. I’m talking about songs such as “We Gather Together,” “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come,” and “Now Thank We All Our God.” Perhaps you don’t know them. But for nearly all my life, those were the songs of November—especially on the Sunday before Thanksgiving—in my local church experience. In the…
Living by faith means longing for more than this world.
When a sermon doesn’t go well, most of us get very discouraged and if the despair is great enough, it might cause us to question whether we should continue to preach at all.
John Calvin was certain God had called and gifted him to serve the burgeoning reform movement in France through biblical scholarship. He would retire to Strasbourg and lead the quiet life of a scholar. Having published the first edition of his Institutes, Calvin had unwittingly invented a new category of investigation: systematic theology. The ivory…
