Biblical · Reformed · Evangelical · Thought-Provoking
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.
Working interviews Jennifer McNutt about her book Calvin Meets Voltaire, which traces the Geneva clergy who held the Reformed line through the Enlightenment. The Geneva pastors offer a longer view for any congregational leader feeling outnumbered by the cultural moment.
Canlis returned to America after seventeen years abroad and was struck by how aggressively the culture sells 'best,' 'biggest,' 'greatest.' Reading Paul through Eugene Peterson, she argues for a theology of the ordinary that finds the work of God in walking-around life.
Ephesians 2 says Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, in the present perfect tense: it was done, and it remains done. Goodloe asks why the church so often acts as if the work were still pending, and what it means to live as those for whom reconciliation is already accomplished.
What clergy wear in worship has changed in his lifetime, and Taylor isn't quite sure all the changes are improvements. Working from Lorimer's nineteenth-century painting of a Scottish Kirk ordination, he reflects on the theology of vestments and what gets lost when the gown disappears.
Online communion split Presbyterians worldwide during COVID. Taylor lays out why his own congregation declined the option even when their denomination permitted it, taking Paul's warning about the body of the Lord seriously enough to insist the body matters.
Part two of Burgess's keynote on John 14:6 picks up the human longing for life that is more than survival. He locates the answer not in the desperate self-renewal our culture sells, but in the gift of life that comes to us from outside ourselves through Christ.
Edwards continues his treatment of John 14:6 by looking at Jesus' own preferred self-designation: Son of Man. Why this odd title from Daniel 7, and what does it tell us about the way Jesus understood himself as 'the way' the Father had given his people?
Nixon learned the limits of video calling during a long-distance courtship: the format is a poor substitute for actually being together. She brings that lesson to bear on the COVID-era church, where Zoom worship and live-streamed sacraments couldn't fill the space the gathered body of Christ left behind.
Burgess opens with a memory of his grandfather, a lifelong Presbyterian missionary in Guatemala, scooping him up off a Denver bus when he was four. The keynote builds from that scene toward the question every Christian eventually meets: where is real life actually found?
The 2020 TM conference set itself the task of confessing Jesus as the way, truth, and life in a pluralistic culture. Burnett's opening keynote asks what makes that confession provocative now, and what we still need to learn about saying it well.
John 14:6 is the most famous line in the Fourth Gospel and the only place there Jesus calls himself 'the way.' Edwards argues that 'way, truth, and life' aren't three separate virtues but characteristics of a single person, and that John 14 isn't about future glory but present access.
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