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No. 421 July 2014
Why Do Christians Suffer?
Christians & Depression
Start The Lord Giveth Biblical Prophecy 101 Christians & Suffering Disaster: Hurricane Katrina Sunday Depression: Venezuela Lonliness: Table For One Heartbreak: A Preacher's Confession Divorce: Gone Disease: Those Who Wait Death: Still Here Zion: A Love Story
Sex is something rarely discussed from the pulpit much beyond a crowd-pleasing condemnation of the behavior, a criminalizing of something God ordained to be perfect and extraordinary. This perpetuates guilt, which holds God’s people in bondage because we don’t understand what the bible actually says about this stuff and, more importantly, what those words mean.
No. 419 May 2014
Arrogance In Leadership
Who IS This Guy?
Start Diotrephes Does Not Receive Us Sense & Nonsense About Prayer Knowing God's Voice Grand Old Opprobrium How To Make Peace With Your Church Musician Intellect vs. Emotion How To Make A Crooked Church Straight Ageism: A Preacher's Confession Zion: A Love Story
Women are the African American church's largest demographic, and yet most of our churches offer little in the way of useful, uncompromised insight and advice into the issues and challenges facing our sisters. This is a collection of no-holds-barred perspectives on key areas of women in the black church.
We, in our ignorance, tend to make Resurrection Sunday about egg hunts for children and increased head counts at our services, exhausting ourselves with the usual pageantry while missing the sobering reality of the terrible sacrifice which earned our redemption This collection is intended to reorient our thinking about this, the Christian faith's most holy day.
As we struggle, year to year, to keep the church doors open, many if not most of our churches are preoccupied with one thing: church growth. Here is a collection of reasons your church is not growing, and how to overcome them.
No. 418 March 2014
American Bigotry X
A Woman's Place
Bad Salesman The Bible 101 Off-Center American Bigotry X American Gothic A Woman's Place Trouble In The Village Anger: A Preacher's Confession Zion: A Love Story
Does Black History Month still matter? Media sources and retail outlets are increasingly ignoring it because they experience no measurable dropoff in black patronage when they do. If we don't care about it, why should they? And is our indifference providing momentum to the trend toward eliminating voting rights and affirmative action legislation? In this presumptively post-racial America, where is the black voice?
No. 417 February 2014
Christians should be anti-drunk, anti-wasted. This behavior abuses your body and denies God’s sovereignty on your life. We struggle with personal behavior and/or shortcomings which do not please God. This is part of the human condition, our carnal imperfection which can only be made perfect through the Holy Spirit. This is a conversation the church should have been having all along: what’s the argument against Christians smoking pot?
Weed The People
My Pagan Valentine
PraiseNet Essentials: 2013 Retrospective
Trust, loyalty, honor, support, faithfulness, absolute confidentiality:
all core values of both the Christian faith and the
Mob. How many of those ideals do we actually
practice? Somewhere along the line we have lost our way. In that respect, we
could learn a lot from the Mob--at least the way the
Mob is supposed to work.
As President Barack Obama completes the first year of his second term, here is a collection of essays about this historic and turbulent presidency, and this president’s constant uphill battle against irrational conservatism and racial hatred, from Election Day 2008 to the present.
No. 416 January 2014
It’s important to point out I’m not talking about
dumb people or even uneducated people.
Making a
conscious choice to not better ourselves, to not be
better informed or more rational, makes a virtue of
intellectual laziness. I blame most of this on Bart
Simpson, who made under-achievement a kind of ersatz
virtue. We are no longer stigmatized for being
stupid which is, in and of itself, stupid.
American Intellectualism In Freefall
Obama Year Five