By Meryl Herr, reprinted from Made to Flourish. Ten years ago, I was the woman who neurotically hummed “Great is Thy Faithfulness” wherever she went. My husband and I had completed a two-year pastoral residency in the middle of the Recession, and we struggled to find full-time work in our fields. I worked retail while my husband worked odd jobs. With…
By Greg Forster; part one of a series. “The Three Kingdoms” can refer to the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. It can refer to the tripartite division of China in the third century. But I’m using it to refer to three inadequate ways modern American churches approach the kingdom of God and its relationship to the kingdoms of human civilization…
By Greg Forster; part one of a series. In this series, I’ll be looking at our daily work as a holy war to destroy the devil’s works. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” He won the victory for us on the cross, of course. But as our work becomes cruciform it becomes a…
By Greg Forster: part eleven of a series. It’s only a totally random coincidence that I wrote this, my final post in this series on the kingdom of God, on the doorstep of Easter. But I might as well have planned it, because I want to propose a reversal of our inadequate models of the kingdom that will bear some…
By Greg Forster: part ten of a series. In my last post I talked about how the underlying theology of accommodation paradigm churches leads to pseudo-pragmatism. Here are three specific ways accommodation paradigm churches can overcome this: The Past: One of the clearest identifying marks of the three paradigms is how they think about the American experiment in freedom and…
By Greg Forster: part nine of a series. “Making it easy to find and follow Jesus.” This is the slogan my accommodation paradigm church used for several years to summarize its mission. It should, of course, be easy to find Jesus. But to follow Jesus? Not so much. It’s along the same lines as the initial advertisements this church was…
Dr. Dallas Bock recently interviewed Andy Crouch on The Table. Andy recently came on staff at the John Templeton Foundation. Previously, he was the executive editor of Christianity Today. He is also the author of a number of books including Strong and Weak, Playing God, and Culture Making as well as the forthcoming The Tech-Wise Family. The focus of this interview…
By Greg Forster: part eight of a series. I believe I have discovered the secret of accommodation paradigm churches. They are not marketing gimmicks. They are spiritual reclamation projects. They make the transformative grace of God imaginable to those for whom grace has become unimaginable. The faith and work movement needs to engage in similar reclamation just as much as it…
By Greg Forster: part seven of a series. In my last post I talked about how the underlying theology of fortification paradigm churches leads to cultural puritanism. Here are three specific ways fortification paradigm churches can overcome this: The Past: Where dominance paradigm churches overestimate both the moral and religious integrity of the American experiment, fortification churches tend to underestimate…
By Greg Forster; part six of a series. “They told us, ‘this is our culture,’ but we told them, ‘this is God’s word.’” I was hearing a talk from a leader in the fortification-paradigm church I used to attend. As I stressed in my last post, this church did a great job of helping people overcome addictions and enslaving sins.…
The Green Room 