Dr Paul Allen

Your academic life was all yours, from elementary to middle and high school to higher education. You read. You studied. You took quizzes, tests, and exams on your own. You did projects and wrote papers. You received your scores, marks, and grades. But occasionally, you were required to participate in a group project. Yes, you remember those. The group project is two or three or more of your classmates joining you to assemble a project for your teacher or professor.  Each member did a piece of the whole to submit it. You had to agree on everything from the topic to the content to how you would present it. And then, you all received the same letter grade, regardless of who did what or how much. Of all the things you were supposed to learn by doing the group project, you probably knew that you never wanted to do a group project again. They just rarely work well. Either you had to do most of the work yourself, or a “weak link” dragged down your grade. Who came up with this form of acad...

“If you’re someone who loved old books–because you love church history and want others to share your enthusiasm–group Bible study can seem like a balancing act between trying to be helpful on one hand and appearing prideful on the other,” writes Travis Hearne for Southern Equip. Teach Theology  through Historic Controversies: Teach gripping stories from the past where different arguments come to life. “Gripping stories are great teaching devices, and the theological controversies from the church’s past are an excellent way to grapple with the deep things of God.” Summarize Truths  through Biblical Confessions: While there is some overlap with point one, many controversies produced statements of truth. “Creeds are helpful because they unite us with a shared belief in a common heritage.” Capture Emotions  through Old Hymns: “There is a wealth of spirituality waiting to be used in Bible study. Old hymns are artistic. And they don’t have to feel out of place if the topic is c...

Discouragement with the state of the modern church and an overly optimistic view of church history has caused some Christians to believe that the church once had a golden age. It’s often suggested that the early church represented this age. We must correct our drifting and return to the values and practices of the early church, the argument goes.  They want the church to be more “Apostolic.” They want it to be more communal (see Acts 2:44). They want it to be free of denominationalism and separation. The natural consequence of this well-intended attitude is a disparagement of the modern church. To identify the early church as the golden era and to yearn for its exact replication is misguided and dangerous. In many ways, these critics are right—there are many things that the church needs to heed from our earliest forefathers. The early Christians faithfully employed the divinely ordained means of grace (v. 42), they shared the gospel with deep fervour, they exhibited tremendous gene...

“Mom, where is God?” “Well, He’s everywhere, sweetheart!” That answer frequently given by mothers to their children is true, but what does that mean? We do not give much thought to God’s omnipresence, do we? We take it for granted that God is “everywhere,” though we do not understand what that means. Does omnipresence mean occupying all the existing space, or is there more to it? Is God everywhere present in the same way? For example, how is He present when the church gathers? This can be a very practical question when we think about Sunday worship.  It has become increasingly common for professing Christians in our Western world to neglect church meetings. Perhaps you have heard people reason like this:  “I believe in God, but church isn’t my thing. I’m not interested in singing, and I find sermons boring. Besides, I can connect with God just as well when I walk in the woods, in the mountains, or on the beach as I can in a church service. After all, God is everywhere.” How do...

In the past 25 years, 42% of our city (metropolitan Orlando, Florida) has stopped attending church. In 2018, we were two pastors who wanted to understand and be fruitful in what we thought was our unique context. We soon learned our context wasn’t unique and that what was happening around us wasn’t as simple as media pundits and Twitter commentators suggested. We live in the most significant and fastest religious shift in U.S. history. Some 40 million adult Americans who used to attend church at least once per month now attend less than once yearly. This shift is larger than the number of conversions during the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and the totality of the Billy Graham Crusades combined. We live in the largest and fastest religious shift in U.S. history. Over the last two years, we’ve worked with respected social scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe to conduct the largest and most comprehensive study of dechurching ever commissioned. In total, we heard from mor...

One hundred years ago, heroin, cocaine and meth were not only street legal but prescribed by doctors for various ailments (for instance, heroin was marketed as a cough suppressant). Only later did we realise that these drug habits were doing far more harm than good. It took decades to outlaw these drugs, but the damage was done. Generations were addicted, and these drugs still plague us today. Toxic habits can be absolutely devastating. Toxic habits were something Jesus himself railed against in Matthew 15:3 when he asked the religious leaders, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?” Some of the very religious traditions held by the day's leaders kept people away from God, defeating the whole purpose. Even a well-intentioned tradition can turn toxic and do more harm than good if we're not careful. Traditions weren’t just a problem in Jesus’ day. We still struggle with them today. Traditions give people a sense of continuity, order, predictabili...

by Ted Peters Our church—evangelical, mainline, Catholic or Orthodox–seems like a sandcastle on an ocean beach. We can stand back and admire our craftsmanship. Then a wave washes up high, and a few grains of sand get eroded. Another wave erodes more of the castle. Wave after wave finally leaves the beach the way it had been before our architectural triumph. Wave after wave of cultural change is eroding our church under our very eyes. Silently and almost invisibly, the digital world is replacing the biblical world. The world of Bible study, hymn singing, praying in unison, and using God as the subject of sentences is becoming forgotten. What now absorbs our attention is a complex array of video gaming, net surfing, Instagramming, Zooming, texting, and sexting. The digital world is actually a disorganized composite of min-worlds. In only half an hour, any teenager can be introduced  to the worldviews of QAnon, Sufism, yoga, new age meditation, naturalism, spiritual-but-not-religious,...

What the local church needs to know about angels, Satan, and demons is an intriguing question. In my experience, I have heard very little from the pulpit or in adult Sunday school on the topic. The question is intriguing because popular culture (movies and TV, for example) teems with treatments, often fanciful, on these themes, especially around Halloween. There are many aspects of the doctrine of angels, Satan, and demons worth making the local church aware of and here are only some of them.[1] The Bigger Canvas B. Philips, a noted Bible translator of the last century, wrote a small book which has proved very influential and is still in print, Your God is Too Small. The title is so instructive. He maintained that too many have a shrunken view of God. With debts to Philips, one could argue that your worldview is too small if it leaves out angels, Satan and demons.  This lack can be a problem at two levels: espoused and operational. At the espoused level, the believer never thinks a...

We live in a lonely and anxious age. Major studies reflect the same dismal trend: people are increasingly isolated. A 2021 study by American Perspectives exposes the sharp decline in friendship in the U.S. over the past 30 years. They found that  10 per cent of women and 15 per cent of men report they don’t have a single friend.  The percentage of women with more than 10 friends has dropped from 28 per cent to 11 per cent. For men, from 40 per cent to 15 per cent.  We’re more and more isolated, and we feel it deeply. According to another report, 61 per cent of adults in America feel lonely, and the rates of loneliness are highest among younger people. In the U.S., life expectancy has decreased for the first time in many years. This context makes the words Jesus said to his followers shortly before his death more urgent: “By this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have a love for one another” (John 13:35). These words have permanently been binding on t...

The sick love of controversy — or the “unhealthy craving for controversy,” as Paul calls it in 1 Timothy 6:4 . The question is from a podcast listener named Brett. “Pastor John, hello! We live in an age of controversy. And that controversy-loving spirit has come into the church.  The Apostle Paul clearly warns us against people in the church who have a ‘diseased’ (nosōn) or ‘unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.’ That’s 1 Timothy 6:4–5 . I wonder if you can lay out principles for what this ‘diseased craving for controversy’ looks like in the church today.” I’ll try to do that in just a moment — namely, lay out some principles to try to avoid what Paul’s denouncing in these verses. But first, let me say a word about what Brett calls our “age of controversy.” He’s right, ...