Note: I preached this sermon today at Towne View Baptist Church, Kennesaw, Georgia. Text (NRSVue) 15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. 16 So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with […]
Plenary Address to Festival of Homiletics, Atlanta, Georgia, May 14, 2025 Note: This is the formal text of my address to the wonderful Festival of Homiletics conference, which gathered over 1400 primarily mainline Protestant church leaders from around the world. I was very struck by the strong response to this message and to a workshop
Proclaiming the Moral Teaching of Jesus
Sermon, Commissioning Service, Mercer University School of Theology, May 9, 2025 Note to Readers: This message reflects the profound challenges that I believe face all ministers of the Gospel at this moment in this context, and the kind of character and faith with which we must meet those challenges. It was presented to the graduates
Convictional. Resistant. Steadfast.
A Sermon on Luke 4:16-30 and Isaiah 61 Note: I wrote this sermon and preached it with (this was a participatory congregation!) the lovely Edgewood Church, in Atlanta, on Sunday, 23 March, the 3rd Sunday of Lent. The Luke 4 text was selected by the pastors of the church. Luke 4:16-30 16 When he came
How Jesus Subverted Nationalist Religion and Almost Got Himself Killed
Note to Readers: I preached this sermon on January 5, 2025 at Genesis Church in Royal Oak, Michigan. My assignment was to talk about how to create an ethic around the person of Jesus and how to do that in community. So even though this was Epiphany Sunday, I chose a text from the other
My newest book, The Moral Teachings of Jesus: Radical Instruction in the Will of God, will be out from Wipf and Stock Publishers (Cascade Books) on September 10. Pre-orders are now available. What I do in this book is dig into forty moral teachings of Jesus as presented in the Gospels. Each of these teachings is addressed
My New Book: The Moral Teachings of Jesus
History may well record that April 16-17, 2024, marked a breakthrough moment in the emergence of an organized post-evangelical Christian movement in the United States. It certainly felt like a breakthrough to this participant-observer, as I had the privilege of attending the third and by far the largest national gathering of the Post-Evangelical Collective last week. Stuffing 300
The Post-Evangelicals Take Their Next Step Forward
The Lenten season has been especially intense for me this year on a spiritual level. I have sought to follow its rhythms, demands and opportunities from Ash Wednesday until now, Holy Week. Each day I have read the Mass readings and experienced their impact. My sense that the Christian life is best undertaken within the rhythm
I begin by saying the obvious: We enter an election year in a time of great political and cultural division in our country. That could have been said every four years since 1968. But today we also can add that we enter an election year with very high levels of social mistrust, loss of confidence in
Thinking Biblically about Government in an Election Year
In my 2020 book, After Evangelicalism, I argued that there were likely twenty-five million people who had been raised evangelical but who had either switched to another religious tradition or no longer identified with any religious tradition. This estimate was based on the massive (35,000 surveyed in all fifty states) and much quoted Pew Research
Now Is the Time to Talk about Post-Evangelicalism—Out Loud and Together