TheologyBergler's earlier book diagnosed how American churches absorbed the values of adolescence; this follow-up asks what maturity looks like and how congregations get there. Offered as an introduction to From Here to Maturity, with the editor's recommendation to read both volumes.
Billings preaches the biblical pattern of barren wombs becoming the very means by which God brings forth promise, from Sarah through Hannah to Elizabeth. A talk about waiting, hope, and the kind of fruitfulness that resists every category we try to put around it.
A 2021 conference address from Stephen Crocco on the courage Christians need to run toward the difficult places rather than away. The metaphor is military, the application is pastoral, and the audience is Reformed believers wondering whether to keep speaking at all.
A conference talk from Lorenzo Small on the church's reason for being. Not its programs, not its buildings, not its institutional momentum, but the underlying calling that holds every congregation accountable: the gospel its existence is meant to bear witness to.
Western Christianity is increasingly described as a community in exile. McNutt asks what the Reformed tradition has to teach a displaced church, drawing on a tradition that has known persecution, dispersion, and the long discipline of being a minority before.
The opening worship service of the 2021 Theology Matters conference. Richard Gibbons preaches the welcome sermon, setting the theological frame for the gathering and inviting attendees into the conversation that follows.
Edwards encountered Ernst Lohmeyer's name as a footnote in his doctoral research and was haunted by the cryptic note that a 'higher power' had carried him off to a 'still-unresolved fate.' The piece traces Lohmeyer's witness under three regimes and what his disappearance can teach us.
Presbyterians prize mature leadership, but American Christianity has spent seven decades absorbing the values of adolescence. Bergler summarizes his award-winning book on how youth ministry shaped the wider church and what we lost by treating perpetual youthfulness as a virtue.
COVID-era ministry left pastors asking questions they'd never had to ask before. Brown sets the pandemic alongside cultural upheavals over identity, race, and politics, and offers practical reminders for ministry that hold up no matter which kind of change is washing over the room.
B. B. Warfield called Calvin pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit. Burnett walks through what Calvin actually taught, why Presbyterians have argued about pneumatology ever since, and where the tradition's habits of thought still serve and where they leave gaps.
The secular world has 'come of age' and finds the church unnecessary. Johnson argues that authentic Christian community begins not with our programs but with Christ himself, and walks Bonhoeffer's insight from Nazi-era Germany into the present-day American congregation.
Church-leadership conferences offer endless cures for stagnant congregations: webinars, restructuring, mergers, branding consultants. Ray draws on John Leith and a long memory to question whether any of these have actually produced what they promise, and to point toward what historically has.
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