Parchment & Pen Blog

When Christian leaders talk about how to live a godly life, they eventually turn to the gray areas those things that are right for some but wrong for others. You know the list: drinking, smoking, watching R rated movies, playing cards, dancing, using colorful language, listening to Country-Western music (OK that last one is not [...]

Often when I begin a series on the emerging church people approach me with two questions: 1) “Am I emerging?” 2) “Are you emerging?” In both counts this is really a loaded question. I have a hard time answering it because I don’t know what they are really asking. It takes some further explaining before [...]

Before my next post on what it means to be emerging, I thought it necessary to reiterate some issues about orthodoxy. I mentioned some in the Emergent strand of emergers that many would place outside “orthodoxy” and this seems to have upset some people because I, in their opinion, too closely associated “orthodoxy” with “evangelical” [...]

How does one define the emerging church? This is not an easy question to answer. Are you emerging? Maybe you are and you just don’t know it. It is very difficult to define exactly what it means to “emerge.” Sometimes its characteristics sound a lot like what “Evangelical” used to mean. Other times it sounds [...]

I sometimes think that the world functions just like one would expect if God did not exist. “Doubt is a necessary evil on our journey toward belief.” We have all felt feelings of doubt. A troubled mind that reaches down and nags at your heart asking it to reconsider. Your heart says no, but feelings [...]

Where do I begin with this? Not sure. I don’t want to be misunderstood in what I am trying to say—Or better, I don’t think that I am trying to say anything, just ask some questions. I will try to give you the essence of my thoughts, then I will attempt to explain what I [...]

I’m busy these days trying to crank out more than a thousand words a day on a church history text contracted by Zondervan, and I don’t have a lot of spare time. I leave it to my readers as to whether or not I should expend the money and time to buy and read The [...]