Writings

This week, I’ve been writing about a strategy designed to stop the departure of young Christians who leave the Church during their college years. As always, I’ve argued we should stop teaching and start training. We’ve been examining a simple model (using T.R.A.I.N. as an acronym) to help describe the …

Hurricanes every hurricane season. Massive earthquakes in Mexico and elsewhere. Volcanoes in several locations around the globe. Record-setting fires across the country. How could an all-loving, all-powerful God allow natural disasters such as these to destroy the lives of His children? John Stonestreet, my colleague at the Colson Center for Christian …

We’ve been examining a strategy to stem the tide of young Christians leaving the Church during their college years. I suggest we stop teaching and start training. I’ve outlined a simple model (using T.R.A.I.N. as an acronym) to help describe the difference between training and teaching. Teaching is about imparting …

The Church is experiencing a crisis. Young Christians are leaving the Church in large numbers during their college years, and our efforts to address the problem have been inadequate. I suggest we stop teaching and start training. In yesterday’s post I outlined a simple model (using T.R.A.I.N. as an acronym) …

The first Thursday of May each year is the National Day of Prayer; an appropriate American celebration, given how many Americans pray regularly. A recent Pew Research Religious Landscape Study found that most of us – 55% – pray every day, and more than three quarters of us (75%) pray …

I’ve written repeatedly about why the Church needs to stop teaching students about their faith. Young Christians are leaving the Church in tremendous numbers during their college years, and our efforts to teach them has been incapable of reducing this rate of attrition. That’s why it’s time to stop teaching …

The authorship of the Gospels is a matter of considerable debate amongst skeptics and critics of the New Testament canon. Mark’s Gospel is an early record of Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection, but Mark isn’t mentioned as an eyewitness in any of the Gospel accounts. How did Mark get …

I’ve been tracking the decline of Christianity in America ever since serving as a youth pastor in the early 2000’s. Even back then I couldn’t help but notice the astonishing rate at which young Christians were leaving the Church. The polls have been consistent about this, and the latest Pew …

I was in the studio a few years ago with Frank Sontag for his KKLA radio program in Los Angeles. We were talking about Cold Case Christianity and the transformation I experienced when I first became a Christian. As an atheist, I embraced a moral code very similar to the …

Moral truths are malleable and subjective if they aren’t grounded in a transcendent source (such as God). I’m not the only person to realize this; even honest atheists recognize the inconsistency of embracing objective moral truths while simultaneously rejecting the one reasonable source for such truths. In a recent exchange …