Does doctrine matter when Christians are dying for their faith? The Center for the Study of Global Christianity estimates 100,000 Christians now die each year, targeted because of their faith. That’s 11 per hour. But would Jesus ever rebuke the persecuted church? He did 2,000 years ago.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I've published a couple of blog posts in an attempt to further squelch the false idea that pastors are constantly miserable and that thousands of them are leaving the church each year. The fact is, they are doing just fine. There are challenges, and the experience is not universal, but when you look at the stats, they are doing pretty well. That does not mean EVERY pastor is doing well, but surveys look at the whole, not individuals, and it's worth looking at real stats.

There is an Evangelical Industrial Complex that helps create and relies upon celebrity leaders. Have you ever wondered why you don’t see pastors from small or medium sized churches on the main stage at big conferences? Or why most of the best-selling Christian authors are megachurch leaders?

I believe there is a connection between expectations and prosperity thinking. More to the point, I believe that prosperity thinking has drifted into the pastoral ministry more than we care to realize it. And we see it with our expectations.

The Church has long felt comfortable with C. S. Lewis. He is quoted regularly from the pulpit and in Christian books and periodicals, not to mention the massive popularity of his own works. But Lewis was not always comfortable with the Church.

Growing up in the evangelical world, I learned something very quickly. There are questions that are acceptable, and there are questions that are not. From there it’s not difficult to realize that there are acceptable answers and there are not. I don’t mean you literally are not allowed to ask or answer questions, but rather that the community of “believers” will treat you as an outsider when you begin to ask the “wrong” questions or discover the “wrong” answers. In this framework, the community perceives the outsider as someone who needs to be converted (again).

Are you doing too many good things? In my experience helping churches think through gospel revitalization, this is one of the most prevalent problems. Yes, you read that right, too many good things. Good activities are often the enemy of strategic activity. There are countless good things that a church can be doing at any given time but there are only a few things that are most strategic at any given time.

On October 31, 1517, Jesus, through a little-known German priest/professor named Martin Luther, came quite literally knocking on the Wittenberg door of the Roman Catholic Church.

Will the church today ground itself in the inerrant Word, and think and write and engage confidently with non-Christian thought? Or will it allow secularism to descend like a shadow over all the West? This question we cannot yet answer — though we know what the neo-evangelicals would say. Perhaps, if some contemporary Christians catch the vision afresh, we will see a “thorough shakedown” in our own time.

Many pastors have shrapnel and scars from the ministry. When a pastor goes through a storage unit of skirmishes, he might pick up a flinch along the way. Pastors who have been through the fire, the storm, and the hard fought battles—some needed, others ugly and unbiblical—will often come down with this peculiar lack of faith. While I’ve never played a doctor on television, I have a diagnosis: I call it Pastoral Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.