In part 1 of this vlog, Dr. Stephen Meyer, Director of the Discover Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, discusses the faults in the beliefs of the Neo-Darwinism movement. Speaking from his own published book, “Darwin’s Doubt” and his experience of attending the Annual Conference of the Royal Society in London, Meyer shares how the evolutionistic belief over the mechanism of mutation and natural selection does not explain the origin of new body plans and body types as seen throughout history.
When I walked into Maranatha Worship Center in Wichita, Kansas seventeen years ago, there were many challenges, but I was fortunate to find a group of people ready to face those challenges. Soon I realized that while I was the 13th pastor in that church’s nearly nine decades of ministry life to that point, I was given a gift that perhaps none of my predecessors had received. People were ready, and even desperate, for change.
In the beginning, humans were created in the image of God but soon sin disfigured that image. Since the Fall (Gen. 3), humankind has struggled to return to the image of God. Today, believers hold to the hope of John’s words that when Christ returns, “we shall be like Him” (1 John 3:2).[1] Christians live in the long struggle between the two images. This brief article reviews the Biblical teaching that addresses how believers may strive toward returning to a proper spiritual formation through the practice of less-emphasized, spiritual disciplines.
The last decade of the 20th century brought new vistas of adventure to the world of Bible study. The word of God was unleashed from the printed page to the digitized screen. For those pioneers who first encountered digital Bible study, it has been a fast-paced turn of events to a day where the Bible is now available for instant word-studies on the phone, quick word searches online, and sermons that can be shared to multiple platforms. Whether you get your devotions from a web page, your lessons from a digital platform or the tried and true method of paper and pen, consider these advantages to the new options in digital Bible study.
As we have looked at the metrics that drive church health, we have seen the “nickels and noses” measures of local church life aren’t truly the best measures of church health. In fact, in the U.S. Assemblies of God today, a slightly higher percentage of large churches are plateaued or declining than are smaller churches. So if bigger isn’t always better, what is better?
Once again, we continue our look at the metrics that drive church health. As we have seen, the “nickels and noses” measures of local church life aren’t truly the best measures of church health. Just because something is bigger doesn’t mean it’s better. If bigger was always better, then doctors would stop bugging us about expanding waistlines.
Numbers are a somewhat controversial topic when it comes to the local church. Some chase them, believing the size of the crowd will speak volumes about their own effectiveness. Others simply insist that Jesus wants to reach everyone, so everyone is the goal. Still others focus their energies on smaller gatherings, searching for an intimacy the crowd can seldom achieve. Church isn’t a numbers game, and yet it really is.
