Gospel.com Blog

Christianity Today’s added a new blog to their growing blog community! The new Christianity Today Movies blog is authored by CT editor Mark Moring and film blogger Peter Chattaway (of FilmChatBlog, one of the staples of my daily blog reading), and seems an excellent companion to the film discussions that CT has hosted over the years.

If you haven’t checked in at CT lately, they’ve been expanding their blog presence quite a bit over the last several months. In addition to their established Out of Ur blog, they added a Politics blog last year to cover the 2008 election cycle (among other things) and more recently a Christian History blog. They’ve got some solid Christian writers driving the blogs—well worth adding to your list of daily reads.

It’s a major accomplishment to have been doing anything on the internet for five years, and even more impressive if it involves blogging. And doubly so if it invovles religion as well.

A big congrats goes to GetReligion for crossing that five year mark this week!

GetReligion is a blog devoted to the tireless scrutiny of religion in the mainstream press. They expertly point it out when religion is written about and more importantly when it’s not. They’re spending this week highlighting favorite posts from the past year. You can check out Doulas LeBlanc’s picks today, but remember to check in and congratulate them throughout the week.

Over a year ago, Village Schools of the Bible Principal Max Frazier, started blogging his musings on the Gospel of John. He completed a similar project on Revelation a year ago. Here’s the table of contents for the project.

This excerpt is from his June 22-28 entry focusing on the Economy. It’s good food for thought no matter what the economic climate may be:

Is there any good news on the horizon? Absolutely…Jesus is coming! Yet I realize that all of us are affected by a declining economy. Giving in many churches is dramatically lower than in past years. Many of you in business are feeling the ramifications of higher energy prices and a lowered consumer confidence. Those of you who are in nonprofit organizations or in missions already know that support raising has become more difficult. I know in our ministry - Village Schools of the Bible - we are seeing some decline in overall giving. If all we looked at were dollars and cents, then we would all be fearful, not only for the future, but also for the present. Yet our future and our present is not predicated upon what the oil-futures market does, or what the hedge-funds say about corn and soybeans, or what the value of the dollar is against …well, you name the currency of your choice. Our hope and our future is based upon this absolute reality…Jesus is coming! And so we cling dearly to that truth. It is our lifeline in the midst of a world of change…at times chaotic change.

Read the rest.

Jonalyn Grace Fincher’s blog is consistently deep. She’s not one to write light and fluffy pieces about her day, but rather in-depth analysis of issues or extensive glimpses into her thought process.

She recently had some great insight into the often vitriolic debate about the roles of women in ministry and the household. Her thoughts jump off of two articles from Christianity Today last month titled Wounds of a Friend: Egalitarian and Wounds of a Friend: Complementarian:

While I do not believe Adam’s first sin was his silence (God never judges or rebukes him for this) I do believe men are guilty of silencing their God-given partner. Koessler warns complementarians from using Scripture to push a certain social construct and control over women, one of which is manifest in calling stay-at-home mother’s as those who are accepting “God’s highest calling.” As one woman friend tells him, “My children are grown and out of the house. So when I hear people say that a woman’s ‘highest calling’ is to be a wife and mother, I find myself wondering if there isn’t anything else for me to do for Christ.”

This is precisely what some complementarians have done to women, in their eagerness to uphold the excellent work of mothering, they’ve allowed all other valuable, excellent jobs, vocations, ministries to pale in comparison. This is not what Christ teaches, which Koessler points out in detail in his article. I mention this here because of a recent post and long, dedicated discussion many of you contributed to the topic of stay-at-home mothering.

…

In a follow-up article, Dr. Sarah Sumner warns egalitarians (those who believe women and men should serve in any capacity in which they are gifted be it elder, deacon, pastor, teacher) in her article “Wounds from a Friend: Egalitarian” that egalitarians need to be careful to use carefully exegeted passages to defend their belief in women’s public ministry, not political ideologies (and I’d add gut feelings like, “I feel very strongly that women should be permitted to preach.”) Egalitarians must be careful about taking Scripture out of context, not slapping just one definition of “head” on I Cor 11, to be wary of a marriage where there is no mutuality, but only independent individuals operating without the other’s input or love and to guard against a genderless church.

There’s more to the post on Jonalyn’s blog. And if you’re interested in more of her thoughts, check out her book, Ruby Slippers.

It’s Friday, and time for another blog roundup—where we point out some of the best blog posts from around the Gospel.com community over the last week. Here’s what people are blogging about this week:

• Are you using the internet to mobilize people for your church or ministry? The Internet Ministry Conference blog points out a good post by Mark Beeson.
• Over at The Culture Beat, Alex Wainer is hunting down allusions to Narnia in the popular TV show Lost.
• GetReligion put a post up earlier today about the religion-news angle of the latest development in the Texas FLDS ranch situation.
• James Watkins talks about God’s timing—in particular, the subtle ways that God prepares us to deal with unexpected crises in our lives. He uses a sobering piece of news from his own life as an illustration.
• The Outflow has a good post up exploring a Biblical perspective on worrying.
• Is there something you want to say, but don’t feel you can say at church or in front of other Christians? ThinkChristian links to a simple but provocative question at FlowerDust.net.
• Behind the Books has posted the first several chapters from Andy Crouch’s much-anticipated upcoming book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. You can download a PDF of the sample chapters or join the book’s Facebook page.
• Andy Unedited has a useful post outlining practical ways to publicize your work through the media.

That’s it for today! Have a great Memorial Day weekend (that is, if you’re in the United States). See you next week!

Is it possible to have a discussion about serious moral and political topics without it devolving into a partisan shouting match? Writer and blogger James Watkins has been seeking the Holy Grail of serious-but-civil dialogue for years through his columns, speaking engagements, and blogging.

Watkins’ daily blog talks about just about everything you can imagine, from the humorous to the deadly serious. But rather than shouting angry opinions from a soapbox, he prefers to step back and weigh both sides of any given debate, always from a Christian point of view. And he usually finds a way to inject some good-natured humor into even the most divisive topics. For some examples, see his posts on the same-sex marriage controversy, the US presidential race, and the Jeremiah Wright controversy. He also contributes to our own ThinkChristian blog, which explores the intersection of faith and culture.

So if you’re a bit tired of the Culture War and the bitter debates it sparks even between Christians, take a look at what Watkins is saying—it might prompt you to look at the Big Issues of the day from a more balanced, and even Christlike, perspective!

There are a lot of blogs within the Gospel.com community—and they’re posting a lot of great content each week. We thought it might be useful to do a short roundup at the end of each week pointing to the best and most interesting posts that have cropped up around the community. So without further ado, here’s what the bloggers in our community are talking about this week:

• David at the Internet Ministry Conference blog wants to know: how do you do ministry online? Do you have a web site? Do you interact with people in chat rooms or within Second Life? Whatever it is that you do, head over and share on the IMC blog.
• The recent ruling in California on same-sex marriage has a lot of people talking. James Watkins shares some thoughts on the topic. And GetReligion has a typically thorough analysis of the issue and the media coverage it’s generated.
• The ESV Bible Blog points out a nifty way to turn the Bible references on your website into Bible Gateway links. They also mention a Wordpress plugin that does something similar with the ESV version of the Bible.
• At Strangely Dim, Lisa Rieck talks about the challenge of keeping in touch with the world.
• It’s annual performance review time at Behind the Books.
• Do you take the Bible literally? Addenda & Errata talks about that touchy question, and offers a nice illustration that explains the difficulty many Christians have answering with a straight “yes” or “no.”
• The ThinkChristian gang has been talking about the recently-released “Evangelical Manifesto,” and is running a poll asking you what you think of the Manifesto.
• The Outflow shares some musings on the will of God.

That’s it for today—and that should be plenty of weekend reading for you. If any of these posts catches your interest, be sure to explore further. There’s a lot more where these posts came from!

Jonalyn Grace Fincher, the author of Ruby Slippers, reacts to the recently released statistic that 1 in 4 teenage girls have an STD:

There is a discouraging, though not altogether unsurprising, statistic making headlines. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 1 in 4 teenage girls have a sexually transmitted disease (STD). The New York Times covers the findings, “Sex Infections Found in Quarter of Teenage Girls”. My thoughts kicked into high gear when I heard that. What are my friends and sister’s friends going to be inheriting in the coming years? Infertility will continue to rise as infections from disease destroy the fine-tuned fertility micro-climate in a woman’s body.

…

But I suppose the thing that bothers me the most is that STDs are infiltrating the core of a woman’s body, targeting her capacities for vulnerability in the future. You know how hard it is to raise your voice when you have a sore, inflamed throat? Or to laugh a deep, vulnerable belly guffaw when you have a cough? Well, that’s a taste of how hard it will be for these young women to be vulnerable in intimacy when the sensitive parts of her body, her reproductive capacities, her sexual pleasure and recreation has been damaged, ravaged by disease, inflamed from infection. The physical pain is just a small slice of the problem. I haven’t even touched on the psychological aspects of sex without the safety and freedom of marriage…

Vulnerability means we have places that can be touched, wounded or pleased. As I’ve written in Ruby Slippers, “Vulnerability requires that we have places that are tender, places we can be affected, touched and even destroyed. A sparrow is more vulnerable than a rock. But because a sparrow is alive, it whistles, and soars, even though it can also be caught by a cat and clawed to death.” (p 112).

You can read more of her thoughts at her blog.

If you’re familiar at all with RBC Ministries, you have probably read at least one of Mart De Haan’s popular “Been Thinking About” essays. Well, if you’ve found Mart’s insights helpful, you’re in luck: there’s also a Been Thinking About blog!

Every day at BeenThinking.org, Mart shares his thoughts on the issues of the day—from current events to the relevancy of Scripture to the challenge of responding to an ever-changing culture. The point is, well, to get you thinking about the world in a fresh and Biblical way. Stop by and take part in the discussion, or follow Mart’s thoughts via RSS.

Who doesn’t have a blog these days? I was pleasantly surprised to discover recently that Woodrow Kroll, the man behind Back to the Bible’s daily radio broadcast, now has a daily blog which features short devotional insights that expand on the day’s radio broadcast. Each post is open for comments, so you can stop by and share your thoughts. Go have a look, or grab the RSS feed!