Christian Living, Biblical Studies, Religion, Spiritual Growth, Theology
John Beeson
The Faith of Unbelief

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.

The Faith of Unbelief
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Don't Numb Your Feelings

“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.

Don't Numb Your Feelings
History, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

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

Lord, Reach Your Justice Down
Culture, Generosity, Nature, Relationships
John Beeson
Marshmallows and Friends

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.

Marshmallows and Friends
Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Uprooting Our Political Identity

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.

Uprooting Our Political Identity

Leadership

, , ,

Crisis and the Creativity of God’s Church

, , ,
Crisis and the Creativity of God’s Church

If you were to list your top three most creative people, who would be on that list? Maybe Vincent van Gogh? Walt Disney? JK Rowling? Thomas Edison? Leonardo DaVinci? Marie Curie?

What would the world be without creatives in our midst? Creativity takes the mundane and makes it special. Creativity solves seemingly intractable problems. Creativity causes smiles, surprise, and thinking.

There was a time that Christians were those on the cutting edge of creativity. Take a look at a medieval cathedral and you can’t help but be impressed. Dig a little deeper at the imbedded symbolism and mathematic artistry in its design and your jaw will drop.

Today’s church doesn’t have a great reputation for its creativity. That is partially its fault (the offerings of Christian movie makers and mainstream visual artists, for instance, have been, for the most part, weak in their creative merits). This is not as it should be. Christians’ thinking ought to be characterized not by its safety, nor by its sentimentality, nor by its predictability.

Whoever tops your list of the most creative people in history is dramatically eclipsed by God. In the beginning, the source of all creativity was. And there was nothing else. And then, with a word, God formed electrons and stars and Loriciferans (look them up!) and Venus Flytraps and Baobab trees and Filbert Weevils and platypuses, and sunsets.

Undoubtedly, part of the way in which we image our creator is in our creativity. While God creates ex nihilo, we create from God’s creation and within the parameters of his order. And it delights him when we do so.

The church is often at her best in crisis. And I believe that the church has been at her creative best in the midst of this COVID-19 outbreak.

, , ,

This Week's Recommendations

, , ,
This Week's Recommendations

1. 6 Myths About Screen Time: Theresa Gonzalez begins with the myth: "My kid is addicted to devices." She responds, "A survey from Common Sense Media found that 47 percent of parents worry that their child is addicted to their mobile device. 'It affects, if you talk about true addiction, somewhere between five and eight percent of children and young adults,'"

2. Things That Will Naturally Happen to Your Team This Week: Eric Geiger says, "Just as a person does not drift towards health, organizations and ministries don’t naturally drift towards greater effectiveness." Geiger offers three helpful ways we can combat this tendency.

3. 6 Members Who Build Up the Church: Chopo Mwanza concludes, "A church with patient members is a church where members confront one another, encourage one another, confess sin to one another, and forgive each other."

4. Five Challenges Pastors Face in a Social Media Age Carey Niewhof explains how pastors can navigate the difficult age of social media.

5. The Big Conversation: Big Conversations, indeed. This is a really interesting and helpful project. On it they explore everything from the reliability of the gospels to science, faith, and God.

, ,

When All You Have is Facebook: Why Social Media Should be Part of our Response to COVID-19

, ,
When All You Have is Facebook: Why Social Media Should be Part of our Response to COVID-19

Social media has received plenty of negative attention over the past several years. More than a few of my friends have sworn off Facebook and Twitter. They are not without reason. Beyond draining time and productivity, it’s well documented that social media has been linked to depression.

There have been more than a few times I’ve considered deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts. In the end, I’ve decided that in a social media age, I shouldn’t stay on these platforms: it’s my responsibility as a pastor to connect with those in my care where they are (I wrote more about that here).

Now, more than ever this is true.

Church, I encourage you to engage online.

In this new world of social distancing and (in some locations) shelter-in-place, there are more reasons than ever to utilize social media. Here are four:

  1. Others are using social media more than ever.

    Anecdotally, our church social media engagement has been through the roof in the past week. Our page views are up over 280%, our post reach is up over 570% and our post engagement is up over 840%. My hunch is that many churches are experiencing the same uptick in engagement.

  2. Most are feeling the loss of relationships.

    With schools closed and many businesses closed or having their employees working remotely, we don’t have nearly the amount of social interaction we had just a couple of weeks ago.

, , , , , ,

This Week's Recommendations

, , , , , ,
This Week's Recommendations

1. 1 in 3 Teens Say They're Religiously Unaffiliated: Aaron Earls reports on findings about teens and religion. One of the interesting notes is that, "Among those who dropped out between the ages of 18 and 22, only 31% say they now attend church regularly."

2. A Tale of Two Failures: My friend Jeff Johnson with a reflection on true engineering failures and why they ought to make us rethink the "fail fast" motto adopted by many in the business world.

3. 12 Things I'd Tell My 25 Year-Old Self About Life and Leadership: Such a great list by Carey Niewhof. He begins with an invitation to trust and submit to the Bible: "For almost my entire life, I have believed that the Word of God is just that – the Word of God. I always landed on the side that trusts the authority of scripture. But I would read certain passages and say to myself “Come on….really?” I thought I knew better."

4. How is Your Prayer Life? Crossway asked that question to Americans and got a helpful glimpse into the average American's prayer life.

5. Interactive Fireflies: This is a fun and interactive explanation of how fireflies can synchronize.

, , , ,

This Week's Recommendations

, , , ,
This Week's Recommendations

1.       Just Give Me a Sign: Angus Martin blasts the tendency for Christians to look for a "sign" as unbiblical.

2.       Why You Should Escape the Algorithm: Carey Niewhof reminds us that, " An astonishing amount of your life and mine is run by algorithms these days, and that’s something that has changed rapidly in the last decade, almost without us knowing it." Niewhof considers four negative implications of that reality and three solutions.

3.       On Being an Inflatable Tank: Tim Challies reflects on the Allied practice of creating dummy armies to fooling the enemy to some today who have dummy public lives. He says, "[M]any Christian leaders are essentially the same way. They can withstand the distant scrutiny of their fans, but not the far more intimate inspection of those who encounter them in real life. Like that fake army, they are useful for deception but not for fighting in the battle."

4.       When Your Plan for Killing Sin Isn't Working: Lara D'Entremont with an insightful piece on our battle with temptation. She begins, "Many of us also know the crushing defeat when the same sin continues to tempt and sway us. I am well acquainted with the doubt that follows when a sin persists. “Maybe I’m not truly saved. Maybe I’m not seeing victory over this sin because I’m still a nonbeliever. Maybe God isn’t with me."

5.       Why Does Time Seem to Fly As You Get Older? Neuroscientist David Eagleman answers.

What’s Your Whiteboard? Why Details Matter in Leadership

What’s Your Whiteboard? Why Details Matter in Leadership

My dad was recently released from a month in the hospital and rehab facilities. My dad has a brain tumor and was admitted for seizures two months ago. His seizures were unusual. Because of the location of the tumor, they were hard to detect unless you knew what to look for: confusion, facial droop, and right-side mobility limitations. While my dad’s medical care overall was very good, multiple times during his stay he had seizures that went undetected by nurses even though they saw him during the seizures. Their oversight was not intentional, but it was frustrating nonetheless. 

I began to realize that I could predict which nurses would be on top of my father’s care and detect his seizures and which nurses would miss the seizures. A simple whiteboard with the patient’s name, the date, the patient’s diagnosis, and the names of the hospital staff adorns every hospital and rehab room. Every three or four days the staff wouldn’t update the whiteboard. I would walk in on a Friday and it would say “Thursday.”

Changing the whiteboard is simple. It doesn’t take the nurse more than a minute and you wouldn’t think that it has much to do with a nurse’s competence. But the whiteboard was the canary in the coal mine for the level of care my father was receiving. Because attentiveness and details matter in medical care. A nurse who doesn’t pay close attention to a whiteboard doesn’t pay close attention to a patient.

, , , ,

This Week's Recommendations

, , , ,
This Week's Recommendations

1.       3 Reasons Your Church Shouldn't Be a Perfect Fit for You: Daniel Darling concludes, "Too often our fights aren’t good fights. They’re over preferences and an unwillingness to die to our preferences in order to give, serve, and love our brothers and sisters in the Lord. Not only should you have things in your church you don’t like, you should embrace the privilege of the opportunity to grow in a community that will be used by God to sanctify you."

2.       I'm So Glad Our Vows Kept Us: Jennie Cesario is a masterful writer. Here she reflects on the difficulty and beauty of marriage. Please read this in its entirety. Here is a taste: " Our hearts are so very tender toward one another now with the long years, softened to a sweetness hard-won."

3.       5 Questions to Discern God's Will: Juan Sanchez with sound advice: " [W]e don’t have to fear what God wills for us. And thankfully, God has revealed His plan and purposes—His will—by His Word (Deuteronomy 29:29). We’re not in the dark about what God desires."

4.       How to be an Appropriately Transparent Leader (Without Oversharing): Carey Niewhof packs in a lot in this helpful post. He concludes, "I find often that the speakers or writers who overshare are people who are processing something for their benefit, not for the benefit of their audience."

5.       12 Fascinating Archaeological Finds in 2019: The finds include a $26.8 million Renaissance masterpiece that was hanging in an unsuspecting French woman’s kitchen and a perfectly preserved 32,000-year-old severed wolf head found in Siberian permafrost.

6.       An Unexpected Duet: Wait until 74 seconds in for the "what?!"

, , ,

Top Posts of 2019

, , ,
Top Posts of 2019

I’ve always written for others. Whether it was creative writing in elementary school where I was excited to share my stories with my teacher and classmates or college when I came home and shared my writing projects with my patient parents.

When I started The Bee Hive, I started it in part because I felt that I needed to steward the gift of writing God had given me. But gifts are stewarded not for our own sake, primarily, but for the sake of the recipient (1 Corinthians 12). My desire was to expand my pastoral reach beyond Sunday morning to serve the church.

If I were to be faithful in stewarding my writing gift but no one were to show up, it would be a struggle to feel the impact of that faithfulness. In my first year of blogging, 2017, I was so encouraged to have 1,767 unique visitors to my website with 3,939 page views. I was so glad that my writing was being read and hopeful that it was helpful. I was concerned, though, that maybe after an acquaintance reading a couple times, maybe the interest would diminish and the impact would wane.

That fear was answered in 2018, when I saw the first year’s numbers nearly double, with 3,463 unique visitors and 6,398 page views. This year I was shocked to have those numbers double again with 8,500 unique visitors and over 13,600 page views. On top of that are my faithful subscribers (thank you!) who read via email. This past year over 10,800 posts via email were read.

My five most-read posts of 2019 follow.

, , , , ,

This Week's Recommendations

, , , , ,
This Week's Recommendations

1.       But Women are Visual Too--Right? An interesting response by social researcher and gender and relationship expert Shaunti Feldhahn. Her bottom line answer to this question is: " We as women have literally never experienced that back-of-the-brain, biological-pleasure temptation that men face every day." It's worth reading the whole article.

2.       6 Things Never to Say to a Bereaved Parent: Angela Miller with thoughtful advice. I love that she doesn't just tell the reader what not to say, but also what to say. For instance, instead of telling a bereaved parent, "Time heals all wounds," Miller suggests, " What would feel healing/helpful to you right now? ~ Is there any way I can help carry your burden? ~ What do you need most today? ~ I am with you. Always."

3.       Ten Questions for Those Who Are Pro-Choice: Andrew Haslam asks important questions for someone to consider as they wrestle with the question of abortion. I appreciate this question: "Why is a woman's body pitted against her baby's?"

4.       3 Postures Leaders Don't Need On Their Leadership Team: Eric Geiger explains why the consultant, senator, and critic hamper leadership teams.

5.       The Fight for Indian Democracy and Persecution in India Continues to Rise: Please keep India in your prayers. “Since BJP has come into power in 2014, minorities in India have lived in constant fear. Persecution of Christians have increased.”

6.       Tyler the Ex-Evangelical: Lutheran Satire has an amazing way at illuminating truths with a wry smile.

, , , , ,

My Favorite Books of 2019 and What I’m Looking Forward to Reading in 2020

, , , , ,
My Favorite Books of 2019 and What I’m Looking Forward to Reading in 2020

2019 was a heavy reading year for me. This year I read 101 books: almost two a week. I love learning and reading is of my favorite forms of learning. If you’re wondering how I read that many books, I’m going to reflect on that next week.

This year you could divide my reading into six (plus one) categories: Christian Living, Theology, Apologetics, Pastoral Ministry, Leadership, and Fiction. The plus one is in the fiction category. I got on a John Steinbeck kick, so I pulled out an extra Steinbeck category. If you’re interested in tracking my reading, getting fuller reviews (I review every book I read), and sharing with me your favorites, I use Goodreads and would be happy to have you friend me there. Here were some highlights for me in 2019:

Sign up to get The Bee Hive delivered to your inbox and receive a free 50 Books That Changed My Life (and Might Change Yours, Too) download!