Dr. James Emery White

I read of a letter that a husband reportedly wrote to his wife. She had left him and their son after a fight, and two days later he wrote her this letter:

Once you are forgiven by God, your sins are gone. They are cast away. They are never able to come back and haunt you, accuse you, nor condemn you.

There is to be one defining mark of a political Christian.

Strange that a famed atheist bemoans the loss of what Christianity has brought to culture, and an agnostic the loss of what Christianity brought to the dynamics of human community. They both reject the faith itself but also mourn the loss of its influence.

Specifically, there has been a trend across genres toward the "simplification of lyrics and an overuse of choruses." Further, the "vocabulary range has also shrunk and the structure of the songs made more predictable."

The story isn't dropping church attendance. The biggest and most concerning revelation is the number one reason people gave for leaving a faith tradition. 67% who left a faith tradition did so because they simply stopped believing in that religion's teachings.

All things COVID might be over, but how it changed the world – and us – did not. Refusing to acknowledge those changes is neither helpful nor wise.

This is for all the church planters and their volunteers on post-Easter Monday, struggling to make it from week-to-week, and for the leaders and members of established churches that are anything but “mega”—well below the 200 threshold in terms of average attendance. I don’t know how Easter Sunday went for you, but I have a hunch.

The amazing thing about Good Friday is that it was – and is – part of the “good” declared by God at creation. “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31, NIV). The Fall was not good; sin, disobedience and suffering are not good. But God’s purpose in creation and the redemptive drama that ensued were – and are – good.

This past weekend has been known as Palm Sunday weekend. So what? It’s a fair question. In our culture, the significance of sacred days and times has long been forgotten.