Bart Ehrman has perhaps done more to undermine the credibility of the Bible than anyone else in my lifetime. But his story didn’t begin that way. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and skeptic. Ehrman grew up in a Christian home, attended a conservative Bible school, and then found his way to a liberal seminary where his faith in the God of the Bible unraveled. That seminary happens to be the seminary I would attend a couple of decades later.
For Ehrman, everywhere he looks he sees holes in the biblical story. The inconsistencies that he sees have led him to determine that he cannot trust in the God of the Bible.
“Don’t listen to your feelings; remember what Jesus did for you!”
“Don’t be guided by your feelings; listen to what God commands you to do!”
In just the past week, I heard both of these warnings. Two very different Christian speakers urged their audiences to shut down their feelings. These admonitions resonate. They contain truth. It is correct that our feelings don’t override truth, nor do our emotions negate what God has done. Neither do our feelings give us an out for what God commands us to do.
I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.
Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.
Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from
Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.
The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.
Happy election day!
In 2016, data scientists Eitan Hersh and Yair Ghitza analyzed data among registered voters to determine how often Democrats and Republicans married. They learned that 9% of marriages had the spouses registered in the two parties. Over the next four years that meager number would drop precipitously, down to 4%.
As Jonathan Haidt and others have successfully argued, the ideological disparity between FOX News and CNBC are child’s play compared to the engineered social media algorithms that create hermetically sealed echo chambers for our political views.
This past year, we’ve visited Evangelical Free, Southern Baptist, Assemblies of God, and Anglican churches and been blessed in each gathering. These are brothers and sisters in Christ who worship the one Triune God. While varied in style and different on theological non-essentials, it is an honor to know that we are part of God’s family: we are rescued by God-made flesh who died for our sins and is risen from the dead. We submit to the same Word of God. We are indwelt by the same Spirit.
Many American Christians are disappointed with their experience at church. Many feel shiftless: lacking deep friendships, disconnected from leadership, and without a direction as disciples.
When I graduated from Gordon with my BA and came back across the country to marry my bride, I busted through the doors of our new church like a bull in a china shop. I wanted to dive into ministry as quickly as I could and sit under a mentor as soon as possible. I was a man on a mission, eager to put my biblical-theological studies degree to use as soon as possible. I reached out to the pastoral staff and tried to jump in as quickly as I could into ministry roles and sought out mentoring from the pastoral staff. There were lots of good things about our experience at that church, but when we left two and a half years later for seminary, I was largely disappointed with the ministry opportunities that had been available to me and the lack of depth of my relationship with the pastoral staff.
Many church members are at a church for years without feeling a significant level of connection and belonging.
Without a doubt, there are ways in which churches need to improve in helping newcomers feel at home quickly and well. That is a post for another day. Today, I want to offer my 21-year-old self some advice about how to make a new church his family.
God intends the local church to be home. One of Paul’s phrases for the church is “the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10) or “the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19).[i] The church ought to be our home: a place where we are intimately connected with our first family.
In the world of non-denominationalism, the tendency is to scrape theology down to its bare minimum. I appreciate the spirit behind that move: to not create division where there shouldn’t be division. Why can’t we join together as a church in unity despite our minor disagreements?
New Life is swimming against that current. In a day and age many church’s doctrinal statements could be printed on written out on a napkin, we have a 37 page doctrinal statement.
I discovered New Life’s doctrinal statement when I began considering whether God might be calling apply to serve on staff. I was pretty surprised. I was also grateful. I’m even more grateful for the doctrinal statement today. Here are 7 reasons why:
When I graduated with my BA in Biblical-Theological studies and came back across the country to marry my bride, I entered our new church like a bull in a china shop. I wanted to get my hands into ministry as quickly as I could and sit under a mentor as soon as possible. I reached out to the pastoral staff and tried to jump in as quickly as I could into various ministry roles and getting mentored. There were lots of good things about our experience at that church, but when we left two and a half years later for seminary, I was largely disappointed with the ministry opportunities that had been available to me and the pastoral mentoring I had received. Some of the blame for my experience falls on the church leadership. But plenty falls on myself.
Many can identify with disappointment in a church. Many of you have been at a church for years without feeling a significant level of connection and belonging.
There are absolutely ways in which churches need to improve in helping newcomers feel at home quickly and well, but there are lots of things I would tell my 21 year old self about how to join a church and what expectations to have.
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