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.
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.
A year into the pandemic, Burnett surveys what Western churches have learned about themselves: the limits of technology, the costs of physical absence, and the question every pastor is now sitting with: will the people actually come back?
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.
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.
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.
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.