There’s a handful of quality Kindle deals for you today.
(Yesterday on the blog: Better Faithful Than Free)
Your Weird, Messy Church is God’s “Plan A”
Jared Wilson: “You don’t have to be cool, big, strong, technologically savvy, politically fashionable, or culturally relevant. You just have to repent of your sin and commit your weird, broken church to its King. It’s the sinners He wants. It’s the losers He’s choosing. Your weird, messy church—in a pandemic or out of it—is God’s Plan A for your world. And there is no Plan B.”
Take Courage, Graduate
Abigail Remhert has one for the young graduates: “Graduate, the reason you feel overwhelmed, though you might not know it, is not because now is when you must decide the rest of your life — it’s simply the first time you have to decide what to do with the next part of your life.”
The Mysterious Case of the Missing Cool Ranch Doritos
Cool Ranch Doritos went missing in Canada for almost two months. It’s related to the pandemic, of course, and makes an interesting case study for how companies have had to adapt (and how spoiled for choice we are under normal circumstances)
Seeing Foster Parents as Local Missionaries
Here’s an argument for seeing foster parents as local missionaries. “Regardless of the reasons people have for not seeing the needs more clearly, foster families are engaged in important ministry and merit assistance from their churches. As the blog’s title suggests, I think these families should be seen as local missionaries in need of support.”
Filtering for Repentance
“One of the many vulnerabilities of the contemporary evangelical church is a stubborn mistaking of quantity for quality. This can be true at a local and global church level where attendances (or more recently ‘hits’ and ‘likes’) can be the marker for how well things are progressing and how much interest is being shown. It can be evident in statistical analysis of the growth of the gospel in the world, which does not bore down deeply into the nature of the ‘gospel’ being believed in, nor the fruit that it is bearing. We are readily fixated on figures, and often filter our view of the influence of a minister, a ministry, or even of Jesus Christ himself, based on numbers.”
My Expert Opinion
Alan Jacobs: “Americans have never more desperately needed reliable knowledge than we do now; also, Americans have never been less inclined to trust experts, who are by definition the people supposed to possess the reliable knowledge. There are many reasons why we have landed ourselves in this frustratingly paradoxical situation, and there’s no obvious way out of it. But I want to suggest that there’s one small thing that journalists can do to help: Stop using the word ‘experts.’”
Three Things to Remember When You’re Digitally Worn Out
Here are a few things to remember when you’re just tired of having to do so much online.
If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both.
—J.I. Packer
