Dr Paul Allen

653 West 37th Street, Chicago, IL 60609 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) We all pay lip service to the reality that we cannot necessarily measure the health of a church by its size.  We all know that some of the biggest churches in the world are also some of the unhealthiest churches in the world. The history of Christianity has long-since shown that it is not all that difficult to fill a building with unbelievers by just tickling their ears with what they want to hear.  We also know that the Lord is sovereign and that he determines how big each church should be and we know that in some areas even a very small church is an absolute triumph of light over darkness. And yet “How big is your church?” is one of the first questions we ask. Why is this? I don’t know all the reasons but I’d suggest at least two.  First, I think our question betrays us and shows that in the back of our minds we equate size and health. Somewhere we make the connection between big and ...

Saint Augustine of Hippo, a seminal thinker on the concept of just war (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) " Holy mother church "—historians are not certain who first said it. The statement has been attributed by some to Cyprian , by others to Augustine . The assertion has survived since the early centuries of Christian history —"Who does not have the church as his mother does not have God as his Father ." From its earliest days, the church was given the appellation "mother." The use of paternal and maternal language is an intriguing phenomenon in religion. We cannot deny the virtual universal tendency to seek ultimate consolation in some sort of divine maternity. We have all experienced the piercing poignancy that attends the plaintiff cry of a child who, in the midst of sobs, says, "I want my mommy." Who of us, when we were children, did not utter these words? Among those who are parents, which of us has not heard these words? The nurturing funct...

Cover via Amazon In 1954, speaking of spiritual depression, Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, "I have no hesitation in asserting that one of the reasons why the Christian Church counts for so little in the modern world is that so many Christians are in this condition."  It's striking to hear of how common the struggle was in his day. Depression is no stranger to the great leaders in church history (in fact, it affected quite a lot of them), but neither is depression uncommon in the church today.  So what do we, as a church, do about it? We recently asked biblical counselor Ed Welch. Here's what he said.  Ed Welch is a speaker at our upcoming National Conference. Visit the   event page   to learn more and register.  For more on the theme of depression see — Ed Welch, book,  Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness Ed Welch, booklet,  Depression: The Way Up When You Are Down John Piper, book,  When the Darkness Will Not Lift John...

Image via Wikipedia I have just ordered my copy of "The Unintended Reformation: How a religious revolution secularized society" by Brad Gregory. Before the Protestant Reformation , Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West .  Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief ; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile lib...

Image via Wikipedia For combination of doctrine and piety, Augustine (354–430) has few peers in the history of Christianity . His writings inform every area of discussion in Christian philosophy , systematic theology, philosophy of history, polemics, rhetoric, and devotion. Though some views support doctrines of intercessory prayer and sacrifices for the dead, purgatory, and transformational justification, Augustine’s mighty doctrines of grace and Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice are given accurate and substantial development in the confessions of Reformed theology . After the fall of Rome , the thousand-year project of rebuilding western civilization on Christian rather than pagan thought proceeded on Augustinian concepts. The Reformation of the sixteenth century rediscovered and built upon neglected elements of Augustine’s doctrine of sin and salvation . Augustine was born in 354 at Tagaste in the Roman Province of Numidia, North Africa. Later observations on infancy and the fa...