Welcome to the online home of Tim Challies, blogger, author, and book reviewer.
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I admit it: I sometimes grow weary of hearing about all the challenges faced by pastors and pastors’ wives and pastors’ kids. Is a pastor’s vocation really so different from any other? Can it really be such a challenge to the rest of his family? Could it be that pastors are just a little too sensitive about the whole thing? I haven’t been a pastor long enough to speak with a whole lot of authority. But a few years into …
There are some books on preaching that are meant for preachers. These are books that teach the nuts and bolts of preaching, that are full of practical tips and illustration. There is a place for such works. There are other books on preaching that are meant for all Christians. These are books that describe the power and priority of preaching in the Christian church and in the Christian life. Steven Lawson’s The Kind of Preaching God Blesses falls squarely in …
Poor Eutychus. He had an opportunity and privilege we’ve all wished for at one time or another: an evening with the world’s foremost theologian. But it didn’t go exactly the way he had imagined (or, to be fair, how the theologian had imagined). Eutychus perched himself in the coolest part of the room–right up there in the window–and listened as this man preached about Jesus Christ. And preached. And preached some more. The evening turned to night. His eyes got …
Harvest Bible Fellowship is a network of churches on the move. It seems as if every week brings a report of a new church plant somewhere in the world. From what I have observed locally, these are solid churches whose pastors love God’s Word and where people are being transformed by the gospel. James MacDonald is the founder of this movement and he refers to them as “vertical” churches. What MacDonald wants is for every local church to be a …
We are definitely not facing a shortage of books on leadership. These titles have sections all their own in the big bookstores, they line the airport bookstalls, and they appear on the bestseller lists with predictable regularity. Much like books on prayer or books on parenting and a select handful of other topics, it appears that there simply cannot be too many of them. Every leader wants to lead better just as every prayer wants to pray better. Readers could …
There are some books that find their strength in saying new things–the original thoughts or perspectives we’ve simply never heard before. There are other books that find their strength in saying old things–things we’ve heard before but just need to hear again, whether that’s because of lack of faith or lack of memory or just because every time something is said it’s said in a different way. Jonathan Leeman’s new book Reverberation: How God’s Word Brings Light, Freedom, and Action …
As Christians we sit through a lot of sermons. The preaching ministry is one of God’s greatest means of grace to us, the means by which he teaches us truth, by which he calls us to pursue truth and to live out of it. And yet many of us are passive listeners, people who expect great preaching skill from the pastor but demand no listening skill from ourselves. Lately I have come across a few resources dedicated to helping Christians …
I have received quite a few books about church planting over the past few months. Among the more interesting have been Church Planting Is for Wimps by Mike McKinley and Discovering Church Planting by J.D. Payne. Fresh off the press is Darrin Patrick’s Church Planter: The Man, The Message, The Mission. Patrick is vice president of the Acts29 Church Planting Network and the founding pastor of the Journey Church in St. Louis. From those vantage points he has seen church …
The Trellis and the Vine was 2009’s surprise hit (read my review). Written by Collin Marshall and Tony Payne, the book described a ministry mind-shift that the authors assured the reader could change everything–everything related to ministry, that is. The book stood upon its simple metaphor of a trellis, an apparatus used to support something, and of a vine, the object that is supported by that trellis. The trellis referred to the administrative work within a church, those tasks that, …
I try not to make a habit of posting book reviews two days in a row, but in this case I felt this book was so special that I needed to bring your attention to it. There are some Christians whose ministries God blesses in extraordinary ways. They preach to thousands and their books are read by millions. But this is the exception far more than the rule. Most Christians labor in relative obscurity, largely unseen and unnoticed. In the …