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Beware the Bloggers and Other Real Dangers
I’m pretty smart. Not Albert Einstein smart or anything, but still, I’ve got game. I laugh when watching the machinations of Harold Hill in the old musical, The Music Man, especially his song “Ya Got Trouble.” I roll my eyes at the quaint gullibility of the people of River City, imagining I’d never fall as hard as they for a grifter’s schemes. But the …[ read more ]
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How to Survive Our Country This Week
What do we do with someone else’s pain? Especially when it leads them to direct their anger towards us. Trauma and open wounds can lead people to toss the baby out with the bathwater, but what if that baby came to save? What if we represent that baby? Days before another election and it feels …[ read more ]
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Abusive Christian Leaders and Our Role in The Cover-Up
Let’s be crystal clear: It isn’t the revelation of abusive leadership that is the problem, it’s the fact of the abuse. The headlines aren’t the problem for the church—the abuse and the cover up are the problems. This time, it’s a report that the Southern Baptist Convention failed to address myriad sexual abuse allegations against …[ read more ]
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The Four Kinds of Embarrassing Christians
Sometimes I’m embarrassed by other Christians. Often, that says more about my spiritual development than theirs. Recently, I revisited one of my all-time favorite movie characters, Blanche Gunderson. In the 2009 movie, New in Town, Blanche is the secretary at a Minnesota manufacturing plant assigned to the corporate executive from Miami, Lucy, sent in to …[ read more ]
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Christian Crank or Life-Giving Messenger from God
Not sure if you’ve noticed but there are a lot of cranks in the church of Christ. That would be splendid, if we ran like the early Model T’s that required cranking to get their engines revving. In my experience, though, church cranks are more likely to kill momentum than to inspire it. Cranky church …[ read more ]