Volume 32 · Issue 1 · Winter 2026
Theology/
Confessional Identity, Ecclesiology, Sermon

Why We Exist

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.

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Canon: A Moving Target?

Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown have made the New Testament canon a contested question again, presenting it as a top-down decree imposed on the early church. Hobson goes back to the actual history and shows that councils didn't decide the canon; they recognized what had already become Scripture by use.

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Pastoral Ministry and Scholarship

Why insist that pastors be trained as scholars? La Montagne separates the Reformed tradition's actual answer from the modern research-university definition that's quietly replaced it, and shows how the original conception still serves congregations better than the institutional one.

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Identifying Boundaries

John Spong rejects monotheism, the incarnation, the Trinity, and the atonement, then claims to be a Christian. Cyre asks what content actually distinguishes Christian faith from anything else, and walks through Paul, Athanasius, and the Reformers for the kind of answer Spong's question demands.

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An Invitation to Combat

Ray opens with a Boy Scout sea voyage to Austria as a fifteen-year-old, the moment a curious kid first met big questions. The address builds from that memory toward an invitation: theology as combat in the best sense, the place where serious questions actually get fought through.

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