His Arm Is Strong to Save: A Trajectory of Conversion in America
The room is dark and packed. Heat surges over the crowd, which sits enthralled by the lone man standing before them. He is holding forth for his audience, engaging their emotions and pointing toward a bold new reality. They reward him with whoops and yells. Eventually, the prophet ascends to a rhetorical climax: The need is dire, and the way forward is clear. Let’s go!
The response is thunderous. Revival has come.
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Review Essay: The Next Christians
Reviewed by Owen Strachan
Gabe Lyons’s The Next Christians is a bold, fresh piece of evangelical strategy. Lyons is a well-known Christian cultural guru, the creator of the Fermi Project. He’s made the letter Q cool—an impressive accomplishment—through Q Ideas, a kind of TED conference for the post-emergent crowd which looks to Scot McKnight, N. T. Wright, Brian McLaren and others for its theological freight.[1] Those who know Gabe, as I do, consider him to be a gracious, reflective, and forward-thinking man who desires to be faithful to Christ and his call.
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The Genesis of Gender and Ecclesial Womanhood
Men and women are different.
To some readers, this is obvious. To an increasing number of people, however, these are fighting words. The idea that men and women are basically, essentially different is passé.[1] To argue further that these differences carve out different roles for men and women which include the “submission” word—let’s just say that won’t win you many friends at a dinner party.[2]
CREATION AND DESIGN
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Book Review: Womanly Dominion: More Than a Gentle and Quiet Spirit
Reviewed by Owen Strachan
Maureen Dowd, an influential columnist for the New York Times, recently suggested that feminism is not working for women. In a piece entitled “Blue Is the New Black,” published in September 2009, she wrote
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Book Review: Manly Dominion: In a Passive-Purple-Four-Ball World
Reviewed by Owen Strachan
We are a generation of wimps raised by mystics.
Such are many Christian men today. Exaggerated piety, deficient manliness, and outright cowardice have conspired to bring about the current state of affairs.
I can say that is true from my own life. Many a decision has left me paralyzed. Which girl to pursue? Which job to take? Which pair of socks to wear? So it is for much of my generation. From the great to the small, we confront the decisions of life with a position of weakness, believing that no decision should be made unless
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Book Review: Membership Matters
INTRO
Church is not much different from the gym. That’s how many Americans think. Just as many gym members struggle to stay committed to the club, so many churchgoers struggle to express commitment to the church. Year after year, they occasionally attend, always feeling guilty, yet perpetually unable to change their pattern of uninvolvement. The cycle of detached attachment continues.
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Book Review: Who Can Save the Incredible Shrinking Church?
Reviewed by Owen Strachan
Frank Page wants to do nothing less than save struggling, shrinking churches everywhere.
The former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of Taylors First Baptist Church in Taylors, South Carolina declares this intention at the outset of his book Who Can Save the Incredible Shrinking Church?
My prayer is that this book will give practical, actionable advice to pastors of all kinds of Bible-believing congregations to enable them to grow into the great kingdom churches God wants them to be. (p. 5)
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Book Review: The Book on Leadership
Do you remember the MacGyver television show from the 1980s? MacGyver was the guy who, with fifteen bad guys bearing down on him, could take a piece of gum, a pipe, and a sock and parachute to safety. He could take the wrong tools and make any task work.
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Book Review: unChristian
Reviewed by Owen Strachan
"Christianity has an image problem." (11)
So say researcher Dave Kinnaman and market innovator Gabe Lyons in the recently published unChristian. A Barna Group research project commissioned by Lyons and led by Kinnaman, unChristian seeks to address this "image problem" by speaking frankly to believers about young people who "admit their emotional and intellectual barriers go up when they are around Christians, and [who] reject Jesus because they feel rejected by Christians" (11).
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Book Review: Advanced Strategic Planning
Reviewed by Owen Strachan
It’s always refreshing to read the work of a man who loves the local church, and Aubrey Malphurs, a church planting consultant and Dallas Seminary professor, surely does. The whole purpose of his book Advanced Strategic Planning is to help local churches become healthy and biblical. He hopes to do this through the process of strategic planning.
OVERVIEW
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