So what if all the decline our congregations and denominations have experienced in recent decades has little to do with a failure of leadership (what congregational leaders fear) or changes in theological or political stances (what more conservative church leaders assert) or a degenerate or disinterested generation of believers (what people in the pew too often feel) or with any of the other things we usually attribute it to. What if the decline is simply the result of a massive cultural shift? That is, what if we now live in a world where the emerging generation a) has tons of options for ways to think about and make sense of their lives,...

Dear Partner in Preaching, Money, politics, and religion, oh my! Yes, here is a passage that contains three of the things people aren’t supposed to talk about in polite company. (Just add sex and you’d have people running out the doors!) But while the temptation will be the flee to other texts this Sunday or, worse, preach a thematic sermon with little reference to the actual passage at hand, I think that if we can stay with the particulars of this text we’ll discover a lot that is worthy of our consideration. Let me begin, though, with a question: why is it, actually, that we’re not supposed to talk about money, politics, and...