God has created the identity of His church. It is far beyond what we claim of ourselves. Failure to believe what is true about ourselves will keep us from doing mighty deeds for God. Certainly what we are is entirely based upon God’s presence in us and His power bequeathed to us. We are nothing on our own. But in Christ, we are something beyond imagination. Consider who God declares we are:

Our church worship gatherings ought to be welcoming and comprehensible to unbelievers who are present, but many churches actually structure the entire worship service around them. There is no real biblical precedent for this, and furthermore, it’s not the most effective way for your church to reach lost people, anyway.

Pope Francis, as head of the Catholic Church, has transformed its image. The pope has shown up on the covers of Rolling Stone, The Advocate and Time magazine, and he’s reached out to non-Catholics, too, saying during a 20/20 special on ABC, “I am at the service of all churches and all men and women of goodwill.” And the new host of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, who has jokingly described himself as “America’s most famous Catholic,” makes it “seem cool to be an intelligent Catholic,” Martin says.

Why is megachurch pastor John Mark Comer ditching conventional church-growth wisdom? Two words: mission and millennials.

A Pennsylvania pastor here said his church has received hangup phone calls after a school board member took issue with the church's sign wishing a blessed Ramadan to its Muslim neighbors and posted a photo of the sign on social media.

In this podcast, Andrew Wilson asks the question: “How should we respond to people whose experience of their gender doesn’t fit with their biological sex? Or who have taken measures to change it? Or whose biological sex is unclear? What does love look like?”

Over the past year, Southern Baptists went to church less, gave less to missions, and baptized fewer people. Yet new churches continued to open, and the people actually in the pews donated more dollars.

I do believe that a church's faithfulness to the mission of God is itself success, regardless of the "results." And I also believe that a faithful church will be a fruitful church. But when some begin defining fruitfulness in quantifiable ways -- decisions, attendance, etc. -- I see more pragmatism and less Bible.

Throughout history, Christians have found all sorts of problematic reasons to not attend church, but we’ve also devised some silly reasons to attend church, too. Below are three bad reasons to go to church. If you go to church for one of these three reasons, you’ll be disappointed, or your church will be annoyed:

Why do we not seem to understand the value of church history to our day—that it would help us recognize that many of the issues we’ve dealt with over the last 10, 20, 100 years are ones we’ve dealt with before? Why are we surprised when universalism rears its ugly head, or false dichotomies pitting God’s love and his holiness gain a hearing?