Discoveries made through a mistake, battles lost by a sudden change of wind, unintentional inflection points in a life through a wrong turn. The history of our world is full of them. In fact, the closer we study major shifts the more likely we are to see they often hinged on seeming unimportant choices that made the outcome radically different. What if Archduke Ferdinand’s driver had not accidentally turned down the wrong street giving a Serbian nationalist his opportunity? What if the wind had not shifted on the Spanish Armada destroying their fleet? What if a dish of bacteria in the lab of Alexander Fleming had not been contaminated with…

More often than not when people long for the earliest church they have in mind an ideal that never existed. Almost from the beginning, it was tested with schisms, false teaching, infighting, jealousy, greed and celebrities with fans. I say almost because there actually was a short time – a matter of days – when things went smoothly. It’s likely those few days that people have in their minds when saying they want to restore the church to its original purity. It was the same with the disciples as Jesus was leaving them after forty days. What was their expectant question?  “Lord, are you going to restore the kingdom to…

Looking back now, it is difficult to believe in early 1972 I was singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in a choir for one of Arthur Blessitt’s crusades in Boston. You might remember Arthur as the man who carried the wooden cross around the world on foot. He logged 38,000 miles and visited 315 nations. A new Christian and like so many others, I had been swept up in the adventure of it. In June of that same year, I was part of the 100,000 high school and college students swarming in Dallas, Texas at the Cotton Bowl for Explo‘72. Sponsored by Campus Crusade, we had come from around the world…

Today is Thanksgiving and tomorrow is Black Friday. We know the majority of all Americans will be shopping over the long weekend with 20 percent shopping today and 70 percent tomorrow. More than 43 percent will be shopping on Saturday (Small Business Saturday) and another 48 percent on Cyber Monday. The holiday shopping season has begun and the expectations from retailers and online merchants are high this year. However, it is not like it used to be when retailers were accustomed to the holidays making up 25 percent of their annual sales. In fact, the trend has been steadily declining and today sales in November and December now account for…

When I was on the Board of “Christianity Today” a number of the editors were concerned the adjective “evangelical” was losing its distinct meaning. The term had gradually become a label used in polls for voting segments in political elections. As such, it was no longer a theological term but had, over time, morphed into a broad demographic label that had little to do with theological distinctives. Yes, there were still some who defined evangelical by their doctrinal views. However, the word itself was becoming more defined by political, tribal and cultural issues than theological positions. That is why the editors came to us with some suggestions about what we…

As a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Roger Thurow came to Tyler asking questions about hunger and what was being done locally. Now a senior fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Roger had been a journalist covering, among other things, global food and agriculture for thirty years in Europe and Africa. While he was here, we had some time in between his interviews and our conversation turned not only to hunger globally and in the United States but to Christian philanthropy and the role it plays in those issues. At that time I was concerned about the almost exclusive focus of much of evangelical philanthropy on…

I love the art of Andrew Wyeth and his family – father N.C. and son, Jamie. Last week I made my first visit to the Brandywine River Museum with friends and sitting in front of Jamie’s portrait of Shorty, a local railroad worker and hermit posed in an elegant wing chair, I started thinking about two sons of slaves who became great artists and builders – perhaps the most famous in the Bible. The Lord chose Bezalel and Oholiab to build the Tabernacle and filled them “with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills – to make artistic designs for work…

How many times have we heard the phrase, “Come, let us reason together”? Like many, I’ve thought if only we could sit down and be rational about our differences, we could come to a reasonable understanding. After all, we are mature adults, right? We all want what is best. Well, it turns out that reasoning out our differences is a very small part of coming to understand what they are and how we resolve them without violence. In Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Righteous Mind” he expands on a metaphor he first used in an earlier book, “The Happiness Hypothesis.” Each of us is two parts – our intuition and our…

Like many Gathering participants, I have an affinity for entrepreneurs. That is one of the reasons so many of us look forward to Praxis being with us at the annual conference. Entrepreneurs are often identified (mistakenly) as risk-takers who don’t calculate before acting. Nothing could be further from the truth. They work hard to eliminate as much risk as possible but having done that they are willing to make the move. This is why I love watching the process of true entrepreneurs eliminating risk to give themselves the best chance of succeeding. I like being a part of their identifying an opportunity brought on by a change. I’ve been in…

“You must keep this ordinance at the appointed time year after year.” Exodus 13:10 We have a hard time understanding permanent traditions, don’t we? We even have difficulty with an infrequent observance of the Lord’s Supper. Many churches once announced ahead of time when they would observe it but stopped because attendance went down. It worked better as a surprise. People don’t want to spend the extra few minutes. They don’t want to be inconvenienced with all the dead time waiting between the wine and the bread. I was visiting a church recently where they gave us the square of bread and a small cup of grape juice to serve…