Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor

Thirty years ago, evangelicals started talking about “worldviews.” I first remember hearing it from Francis Schaeffer. It began innocently enough–as an attempt on the part of evangelicals to become a little more thoughtful about the faith...

We love these sticky phrases, don’t we? Especially the ones that get us off the hook like this one does...

Many of you are cringing. Not to worry, this post won’t be a laundry list of American evangelicals at our worst. There’s only one thing worth mentioning and it trumps all the others:t at our worst, we’re more concerned with being right than being evangelical...

I’ve owed you this post for a while. Yes, I have a pebble in my shoe over the current state of the American evangelical movement of which my tribe, the Vineyard, is a part. Yes, I think Phariseeism is alive and well in evangelicalism...

Seems to be a preoccupation of religion these days. Let me show you how wrong the world is about sin, righteousness, and judgment. Let me show you how wrong the world is about abortion and gay marriage, and evolution and climate change and on and on and on it goes…....

Well I’ve gone and made a few of you nervous, which means we’ve got a good conversation going about Jesus and Paul and understanding this book that is so important to us or we wouldn’t bother...

They devoted themselves to “the apostles’ teaching” said Luke, the traveling companion of Paul, regarding the new Jesus community. What did that refer to in historical context...

Many pastors I know are subject to the mental cruelty of their own rumination. Oh, it’s the bane of pastoral ministry! Rumination, like a cow chewing her cud, swallowing, regurgitating to chew some more, ad nauseum, pun intended...

So you’re a young pastor. Have you noticed that people sin? Yes, they do bad things. Some they do to you–complain about you to others for example because they are afraid to speak with you directly. Oh that’s galling...

Love demands more of us than any other thing. Because God is love, and man, can he be demanding! So why does an emphasis on love make some people of faith nervous...

Carl Safina, an environmental scientist and science writer of some note, spoke at the Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor two weeks ago. Our first secular scientist as a speaker–a man who professes no Christian faith, but is an admirer of Jesus of Nazareth along with Charles Darwin...

Words are very potent things. They carry things like truth in them. They can function as “memes.” Memes are bits of cultural data that are analogous to genes. They get transferred from person to person, outlasting persons and seem to have a life of their own...

It was an odd encounter, but not the first of it’s kind. I had been asked to speak at a Catholic conference on what Catholics might learn from evangelical churches...

Carl Safina, the preeminent ocean conservationist alive today, and author of Song for the Blue Ocean will be speaking at the Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor this coming Sunday. Why? Because he is the friend of sinners...

If I were a thoughtful reader of this blog, I could imagine being annoyed by the message coming through. What’s got this guy so hot and bothered? Why does he even bother to identify as evangelical if he’s got such a withering critique of American evangelicalism...

Advice to young pastors: to be a pastor in the context of the evangelical landscape is a privilege. By all measures evangelical Christianity is the most vibrant form of faith in the United States...

Something’s happening in American Evangelicalism. We’re waking up from a stupor. We’re repenting of our sins. We’re responding to our founder, who is asserting his proprietary rights over his brand–a brand which has been the subject of trademark infringement for too long...

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, a man whose name has been much maligned by many in my own American evangelical tribe...

Sola Jesu rather than sola scriptura is the scriptural sola. By asserting Sola Jesu one is honoring, not denigrating Scripture. What is the purpose of Scripture according to Scripture? Careful...

Sola Scriptura is the rallying cry of the Protestant Reformation, but it never rang true for me. I was never a Lutheran or a Presbyterian...

Perhaps you know that I’ve stumbled into a concern for the environment. No, I’ve been led. It’s not something I sought out. It was thrust upon me. And my interest in this topic is fueled by my concern for the gospel, which has been getting a bad name of late. For good reason...

This question of identity and how we understand ours as Jesus followers is important. It’s fraught for a reason. We’d like to think it’s all about convictions. If I have X convictions then I’m an X. If my convictions are Y then I’m a Y...

Evangelical, what’s in a name? It’s funny how you get these names. I don’t recall signing up to be an evangelical. It just happened. Well, not quite. I was a Jesus freak, see, back when the Jesus movement was a kind of amorphous cultural happening...

Eight years ago today we were all breathing a sigh of relief about the Y2K disaster that didn’t materialize. People of evangelical faith especially. Because for some reason many evangelicals and fundamentalists bought the idea that the world was headed for a techno-cataclysm...

Good pastors are about empowering people to do the Jesus stuff. So there is a great need for pastors who can learn to trust others to do things better than themselves. Clericalism, the view that pastors are the Christian professionals who can do Christianity better than anyone else is boo-honkey...

As a young pastor many years ago, I couldn’t help but look around for pastors to be like. Oh I know we can’t be like anyone but ourselves, but part of that process involves admiring certain others if for no other reason than to encourage the best in our ourselves...

My friend Rich Cizik, a prominent leader of the National Association of Evangelicals resigned recently after the proverbial firestorm of protest...