So what is the difference between guilt and shame?
Guilt says “You’ve done something wrong.”
Shame says “There is something wrong with you.”
In his book, Atonement for a “Sinless” Society, Alan Mann suggests that before churches address the problem of guilt they must address the epidemic of shame that exists in a post-Christian culture.
Do you agree?

In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers unpack six principles that make an idea sticky. The first is Simplicity. They write, “How do we find the essential core of our ideas? To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.”
This is one of the hardest things […]

Here is a great article from Tom Bandy.

Imagine. It is almost 11:00 on Friday night when the phone rings. Your neighbor is calling in a panic. He is not particularly religious, but he knows that you go to church regularly. In a rush of words he tells you that his daughter is being held in […]

On Sunday, September 9th, 2001, I told the church I was working with in Bellingham, Washington that I was resigning at the end of the year and probably getting out of professional ministry. I was going to get my real estate license and get busy buying, selling, and developing property.
I was disillusioned, depressed, […]

What began as the relaying of a conversation I overheard and my initial reaction to it has grown in the comments into a much more important discussion on evangelism.
Mainly, where do you begin when sharing the gospel with a skeptical seeker or seeking skeptic? (They are slightly different animals you know.)
I think […]

Yesterday, while at Panera Bread, I had the privilege of overhearing a conversation between a skeptic and a couple of Christians. If I hadn’t heard this myself, I would have never believed it had taken place.
The two Christians were trying to evangelize this skeptic and he was having none of it.
They asked him if […]

Check out my article, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, over at Wineskins Magazine.

table fellowship, inclusion

Yesterday at the Tulsa Emergent Cohort we talked about evangelism. I tried to stoke the conversation by bringing some quotes from one of the best books on evangelism I’ve read: The Logic of Evangelism by William J. Abraham.

What is especially striking is the way in which the gospel of the kingdom […]

Another great book I read in 2005 is Embracing Grace by Scot McKnight. Scot’s blog is a must read and I listed another book of his, The Jesus Creed, in my official 2005 favorites list. I’ve become quite a fan of McKnight’s work over the last six or seven months. He’s also […]

The second section of McLaren’sThe Secret Message of Jesus is called “Engagement: Grappling with the Meaning of Jesus’s Message.”
In chapter six, McLaren gives a brief introduction to the parables, which he calls the medium of Jesus’s message. He writes, “Human kingdoms advance by force and violence with falling bombs and flying bullets, but God’s […]