Exploring Faith and Spirituality

Religion

Before Your Church Plants, Ask Why

My church in Singapore is preparing to plant a church. We knew there would be questions, starting with “Why are we doing this?” Why choose to make ourselves smaller? Why “lose” faithful members an...

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Editor’s Pick: Children’s Discipleship Resources

Discipling kids at home and in the church is an ever-changing challenge. The truths of Christianity never change, but our culture mutates so rapidly it’s hard to keep up. A friend of mine planned ...

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How Do You Want Your Children to Remember You? (with Michael Keller)

I want to tell a story about how I learned something that changed my life. It was the first Keller Center retreat in 2023. Our inaugural fellows, a couple dozen of them, didn’t know each other well...

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How Your Story of Sorrow Fits into the Gospel Story

Everyone has a story. Your story is shaped by the culture you live in. In my city, we’ve absorbed the story of success, which whispers that we’re only as valuable as our last achievement or our mos...

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When Your Christian Workplace Isn’t Very Christian

I work for a Christian organization that does not have a healthy culture. This leads me to feel a lot of discouragement and cynicism. I know the world is full of sin, including at Christian ministr...

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The Parable of the Cancer Cell

I’m walking through a season of suffering in the form of cancer. My weeks are filled with trips to the hospital, blood draws, and days resting in bed. I’m thankful the cancer is very treatable and ...

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How to Grieve When Loved Ones Leave for the Mission Field

I talk about my soon-to-be missionary parents often, and there’s pride on my face each time. I love to tell how the Lord has gifted them with a heart for the nations and how they’ve prayed for the ...

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What AI Is Teaching My Youth Group Girls

“I can’t even text my friend without asking AI what to say first,” one of the girls in my eighth- and ninth-grade small group told me. It’s no surprise that each generation, for the most part, use...

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Why I’m Not a Christian Nationalist

Not long ago, our church got an unexpected lesson in the importance of religious liberty. We’ve been looking for property for a permanent location for our Chapel Hill campus, which currently meets...

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The Subversive Gospel in a Polarized World (Part 2)

Does the gospel have the power to bridge the chasms within our polarized society? In the second of this two-part episode, recorded at TGC25, Bill Riedel gives pastoral reflections on how we can see...

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How Privatized Spirituality Makes Us Lonely

Over the past three years, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard someone say something like “I believe in God, but I’m against organized religion,” “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious,” or...

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Live, Laugh, Love, and Blame Christian Women

On rainy Sunday afternoons in my childhood, I’d go over to my grandparents’ house and watch I Love Lucy. In several episodes, Lucy and Ethel head off to bridge club. The card game is an excuse for ...

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Why Kids’ Books Matter (with Jen Wilkin)

Melissa and Courtney talk with Jen Wilkin about their mutual love of children’s books and why reading to children can be a key part of discipleship (as well as a delight!). They talk about what bo...

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C. S. Lewis’s Overlooked Apologetics Strategy

When you think about C. S. Lewis and apologetics, what books come to mind? Most likely Mere Christianity, Miracles, or The Problem of Pain. These frontal attacks on modern skepticism do undoubtedly...

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Why We Said ‘No’ to IVF and ‘Yes’ to Embryo Adoption

The 2019 Book of Common Prayer contains a liturgy of thanksgiving for the birth of a child and one of thanksgiving for the adoption of a child. When our daughter was born in September 2024, we aske...

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2 Ways to Fail Your Child

There are two ways to fail your child, and they move in opposite directions. You can fail by keeping too much out. You can bring up a child so isolated from anything that goes against your faith t...

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Why Our Baptist Forebears Wouldn’t Support Blasphemy Laws

In recent weeks, there’s been quite a dustup over a recently released book in which R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues that “the government has the...

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AI: Empire or Infinity Machine?

Plenty of books, articles, and essays about so-called artificial intelligence are a bit boring. They may be accurate, knowledgeable, worthy, even wise, but they often lack the key elements of drama...

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As AI Leaves You Behind, What Will You Live For?

Can anything good come out of Liechtenstein? When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn traveled there in 1993 to receive an honorary doctorate from the International Academy of Philosophy, the famed Russian dis...

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On My Shelf: Life and Books with Timothy Larsen

On My Shelf helps you get to know various writers through a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their lives as readers. I asked Timothy Larsen—historian, Wheaton College professor, and author of The Fi...

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Literal or Symbolic? Reading Revelation Responsibly

Without a doubt, Revelation is one of the most difficult Bible books to understand. It has baffled ancient and modern commentators alike. Yet Revelation continues to capture the church’s imaginatio...

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