Prayer Tips: When to Pray
In the early days of his Christian walk, someone said, “I just don’t seem to have time to pray!” A mentor responded in a gentle tone with a stubborn and convicting principle: “you make time for your priorities.” Yet, the…
Category Theology for Everyone
Prayer Tips: Keeping Attentive
They had one job to do: stay awake and pray. Peter, James, and John, often like the rest of us, failed to accomplish the one simple task they had. Christ took his most trusted inner apostolic circle deeper into the…
Church Discipline: What is Excommunication?
Learning about the battle between popes and civil authorities in medieval Europe feels a bit like an episode of Oprah’s show: “You get excommunicated; you get excommunicated; everyone gets excommunicated.” Of course it famously culminated in Henry VIII finally not…
Church Discipline: Wisely and Lovingly Receive Righteous Rebukes
This Church Discipline series focused on guiding members in need of repentance by formal levels of rebuke. But the hopeful prayer of elders at each point of censure along the way is that it need never go further, especially not…
Church Discipline: What Does Suspension Mean?
There are times within a disciplinary process that some in the church must be temporarily postponed from their normal opportunity to take part in the formal fellowship or service of the saints. The status of those so suspended is not…
Church Discipline: What is Rebuke?
Reformed, confessional theologians often point out that discipline is one of three signs of a true church.[1] Highlighting this distinguishing mark, my seminary professor once rhetorically asked our class, “How many true churches are out there?” The Westminster Confession of…
Church Discipline: What is Admonition?
The right preaching of the Gospel, the right administration of the sacraments and church discipline have together been held, among Protestants, as the key marks of any true church. And though the third mark, church discipline, has sadly been neglected…
Church Discipline
In 381 the Council of Constantinople wrote the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. In that creed we find the attributes of the Church. The famous line says that the church is “one, holy, catholic and apostolic.” However, in the days of the Reformation…
My Covid Year Reading: The Last Battle
“In the Last Days of Narnia, far up to the west.” This is how C.S. Lewis begins the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle. I reread this book last year, right in the middle of the pandemic…
My Covid Year Reading: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Author Jim Belcher illustrates his chapter, “The Struggle Within,”[1] with a compelling psychoanalysis of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s classic novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.[2] Dr. Henry Jekyll, a reputable scientist wanting to enjoy being exclusively good…