Weekend A La Carte: Meet the Messiah who came to serve / What do we actually know about the three wise men? / What now for those evangelicals from fled to Rome? / The United Methodist reckoning / Was Spurgeon really anti-Christmas? / In the fog, there are tidings of comfort and joy / and more.See AlsoWeekend A La Carte (May 13)Weekend A La Carte (December 17)A La Carte (December 21)
Read More
I am so glad that the holiday season is finally upon us. And as much as I enjoy all the feasts and festivities, what I’m most looking forward to is days of rest and times with family. We anticipate that the next couple of weeks will be fairly low-key, and that’s okay by us. 2023 has been a unique year for me as I completed the great majority of the travel for Worship Round the World. I visited 25 countries, worshipped with a local church in 13 of them, spent time with Christians in a further 7, and recorded hundreds of hours of video. My travel app tells me I flew about 160,000 miles and spent just over 14 days in the air. My body tells me I may have overdone it a little. But I can’t even begin to describe what a blessing it was to meet so many wonderful people and worship with so many beautiful churches. The book and documentary are now both well underway and I look forward to sharing it all with you in due time. Next year should be significantly quieter, though I do intend to do a little more speaking at conferences. I’ll be at events in Calgary, Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Dallas, among others. I’ll also be speaking briefly in Brazil and Albania, and making a two-week trip through Italy, Austria, and Romania. Okay, so maybe next year won’t be that much quieter. Either way, I’d love to meet you at one of those events! But for…See AlsoA La Carte (December 29)A La Carte (12/9)A La Carte (11/24)
Read More
A La Carte: When a pastor falls / The rewards of faithful suffering / A peanut butter and jelly Christmas Eve / True rest / Who is this one lying in the manger? / Why such a lowly birth? / and more.See AlsoA La Carte (12/19)A La Carte (9/1)A La Carte (8/21)
Read More
Thursday A La Carte: Where is the source of your joy this Christmas? / Good new of great joy that will malform all the people / The icing on the cake of Pope Francis / When did multiple services begin? / Christmas in a foreign land / Fading glory and permanent things / and more.See AlsoWeekend A La Carte (December 24)A La Carte (December 21)A La Carte (December 1)
Read More
I probably don’t need to tell you how much I love books in general, and Christian books in particular. One of my favorite times to be a reader is in mid-December when people begin to share their picks for the top books of the year. I usually collect a good number of these lists and scour them to see if there is any consensus. I have done that over the past few weeks and am ready to share the results. A few years ago it always seemed simple to find a few consensus picks. Over the past years, for one reason or another, it has become far more difficult. So while I scour as many lists as ever, it is rare for a single book to appear on more than a handful of them. With that in mind, here are the ones that appeared repeatedly and, in a more subjective sense, seemed to generate the most positive buzz throughout the year. If I had to list just a couple of others, they would likely be Remaking the World by Andrew Wilson and The Great Dechurching by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge. Here is an incomplete list of the various awards and roundups I consulted. (I feel compelled to note that both Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition base their awards on paid submissions—publishers must submit their books and pay a fee for them to be considered which makes their process and criteria a little different.) Let me add a word about methodology. The…See AlsoThe Collected Best Books of 2022The Consensus Best Books of 2020An Epic Timeline
Read More