If the Rev. John DeBonville could preach a sermon to lift the souls of churchgoers across America, his message would be simple: Stop dressing so tacky for church. DeBonville has heard about the “come as you are” approach to dressing down for Sunday service, but he says the Sabbath is getting too sloppy.

Taken as a whole, the issue of the Harvard Theological Review released last week includes some scholars who stalwartly defend the fragment as authentic, some who argue that there is no convincing proof that it is a forgery, and at least one who argues that the case for authenticity is laughable. But the most important line in the entire issue is offered by Professor King herself: “In my reading, however, the main point of [the fragment] is simply to affirm that women who are wives and mothers can be Jesus’s disciples.”

In the opening pages of his new book, Why We Eat Our Own, Michael Cheshire aggressively challenges conventional and habitual church methods for dealing with sinners. Why does the church treat its own sinful people so badly? More specifically, why, when we serve such a loving and forgiving God, are God’s people so often angry and divided? These are the questions Cheshire sets out to answer.

I am by no means making the case that there is no room for debate or improvement in how traditional Christians approach politics. But one cannot reasonably explain the position most Christians take on these issues by referring to alleged sex-obsession. Nor can one reasonably blame Christians alone for the prominence of these issues in our society today. It takes two sides to have an argument. Blaming Christians, by implying that they are the extreme party, is just a subtle way of taking the opposing side.

As a professional counselor, author and relationship expert, I wonder if our Christian culture at large tends to get fixated on romantic relationships, without remembering the other important relationships that God calls us into. Somehow, we've fallen prey to the dangerous mindset of seeing marriage as the only relationship that is supposed to reflect the Body of Christ.

Understanding the cross as cosmic victory means that, in the atonement, Jesus defeats the enemies of God by satisfying the wrath of God. Because the kingdom of God is a central theme in Scripture, our view of the atonement must account for how Jesus conquers his kingdom enemies: Satan, sin, and death.

I keep hearing statistics quoted at conferences and through blogs and social media that make me scratch my head in amazement. I'm not sure where some of these stats originate, and I'm the president of LifeWay Research. So how can you really discern good stats from bad?

I’ve been doing criminal interviews and interrogations for many years now, and I’ve interviewed a variety of criminal offenders. I’ve learned an important principle, analogous with baseball, in these repeated efforts to get to the truth: home runs aren’t the only way to score. In fact, there are times when swinging for the fences can be a distinct liability. Baseball games are usually won with singles and doubles. This analogous truth is equally applicable to our efforts to share and defend the Christian worldview.

One of the most frequent objections I get to our multi-site approach is this: “Why do you plant more campuses when you can plant churches instead?” Since our church is committed to church planting, I take this objection very seriously. And at first glance, the objection seems rather intuitive—people and money you could be investing in a church plant are instead being re-directed into a campus.

While the Crusaders once wielded swords, Christians today wield credit cards. And although the currency is no longer life and death, both scenarios embody power in a common currency of the day—the mighty sword then, and the almighty dollar now.