If you don’t click all these links, how will you know they’re not talking about you?
- The Gay Debate Continues: How can we pick and choose which Levitical laws continue into the present age and which don’t? That’s easy. Acts 15 tells us which ones carry forward.
- An appeals court in Tehran rejected the appeal of American Pastor Saeed Abedini, a U.S. citizen, and refused to reduce his 8-year prison sentence.
- An Anthropology professor, writing in the New York Times, takes an academic look at speaking in tongues.
- No doubt about it, in churches of all stripes, Bible reading is notable for the presence of smart phones.
- “I loved Jacob, but I hated Esau…” English Bible translations use the love/hate motif but the passage raises translation and interpretation issues that are a lot more complicated.
- If you’re a church leader and you’re constantly dealing with how to disciple messy, new believers, then it probably means you’re doing something right. Conversely, if everyone in your church is spiritually mature, then something is terribly wrong.
- Russell S. Doughten, Jr., the man responsible for the making of the landmark Christian film A Thief in the Night, died on Monday at age 86.
- Thom Rainer thinks that church membership is relatively stable, but that the decline in church attendance is more connected to frequency of attendance.
- Part-time pastor: A bi-vocational minister looks at logistical sustainability problems in bi-vocational ministry.
- Here’s a worship song from the UK that gained a lot of traction here over the summer, Let it Be Known by Worship Central.
- So who are your non-Christian friends? Better yet, if we were to ask your neighbors, do they have any Christian friends? Maybe not.
- If experience teaches me anything, lots of you will click through to read an article called Getting Naked With Your Friends.
- Rob Bell’s next book is titled Zinzum. Yes, Zinzum: God’s Secret for What Makes Marriages Flourish. Other than that it’s a book about marriage, I have no idea what the title means, and that doesn’t surprise me.
- Bonus video: The song Jon Acuff recently called his current favorite, Josh Garrels’ 2011 update of Farther Along.
- A woman who supported her gay daughter’s campaign for health benefits has been kicked out of her Tennessee church.
- Canada’s public broadcaster highlights 50 different responses to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
- Nominations for The Dove Awards – the Christian Grammy Awards equivalent – have been announced, including Lecrae and Chris Tomlin. (I feel I should know that second name…)
- Bahamas’ pastor Thabiti Anyabwile believes that many of us discussing homosexuality are unnecessarily suppressing our gag reflex.
- Steven Furtick is building momentum for a 2014 book, Crash the Chatterbox, dealing with the voices that chatter fear, insecurity, condemnation and discouragement by inviting people to join a movement of people called Chatterboxers.
- Social Media Sins Department: Facebook is now the theme of a gospel choir song.
- Remember, parents; if nothing else, your parenting techniques can always serve as a bad example. (Found in this article.)
- Canada’s blog for Christian book and music retailers celebrates its 5th birthday.
- It would be great if I was getting a kickback for this rather blatant advertisement, but it turns out the Christian kids’ classic Bullfrogs and Butterflies is still available. Can Psalty the singing songbook be far behind?
- And speaking of children’s music, I can’t think of a better ending this week than this nugget of wisdom.
Paul Wilkinson is a writer and prognosticator who blogs at Thinking Out Loud and whose Twitter handle does that annoying thing where numbers are substituted for letters, hence @paulw1lk1nson (he forgot to switch the ‘o’ for a zero.)