What would happen if believers were to increase their giving to a minimum of, let's say, 10 percent? The number is now 2.5 percent, so there would be an additional $165 billion for churches to use and distribute. The global impact would be phenomenal. Here's just a few things the Church could do with the kind of money:

Satan hates God and therefore he hates God’s people, the church. His great plan for the church is to cause Christians—true believers who ought to be together in the gospel—to find ways of disagreeing among themselves, to divide, to be bitter and jealous, and ultimately to “bite and devour one another” (Gal. 5:15). Here are twelve ways that you can repulse Satan’s attacks.

I don't think there is anything much wrong with a bit of boring now and again. No, I will go further. I think the experience of boring is good for us. But we now live in a culture that is pathologically fearful of being bored. Indeed, I think the church has been heroically counter-cultural in its defence of that little bit of the week that one can reasonably expect to be just a little bit dull, where our seemingly insatiable desire to be endlessly absorbed by some diverting intervention is challenged.

Though uncomfortable at times, the pursuit of multiculturalism in the Church isn’t just nice—it’s necessary. We ultimately develop richer, more wonderfully complex views of God and a deeper love and appreciation for one another when we choose to actively participate in one another's stories that are different from our own, that originate from different places.

I drink beer. Let me be more precise: I love beer. I think the quote "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy," is onto something. While I love my choice libations, I am disturbed by the Church's lack of commentary on drinking. Alcohol, like food, is a good gift from God. Did you catch that? Alcohol is a good gift from God, to be enjoyed appropriately. Unfortunately, the Church has one of two damaging responses to alcohol: Either we say it's devil's brew or we are mute on the subject.

According to a recent survey of Christian adults conducted by the Barna Group, more than half of Christians in this country identify themselves as leaders (58%). And yet, more than eight in 10 (82%) of the same survey participants indicated that they believe the United States is facing a leadership crisis because there aren’t enough leaders. So where is the disconnect happening? Where is this crisis coming from if so many Christians already see themselves as leaders? What is the missing link?

Most people “hurt by the church” were hurt by individuals in a local congregation. Once we establish that, then we’re then left to help them think through whether the offense occurred knowingly and intentionally or unknowingly and accidentally. I’m surprised how often the individuals or churches that “hurt” someone have no idea an offense has occurred.

The Vatican is asking Catholics to take up evangelizing, to speak openly of one’s faith in order to spread it. While such personal sharing has long been the province of, well, evangelical Protestants, it means a paradigm shift for Catholics, whose spiritual lives have been largely centered inside the parish. But with Catholicism in the West facing major losses and what Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl — a Vatican point man on the new request — calls a “tsunami of secularism,” the church this year is pouring resources into a massive campaign dubbed “the new evangelization.”

Revivals have been a large part of American religious culture since the 1700s. A preacher would come to a town and attract thousands—ranging from the illiterate to the literati (like Benjamin Franklin)—to hear about getting religion. These events often lasted days, and many who produced them became masters at holding a crowd’s attention. By the early 1900s, many revivals began to look more like Vaudeville and the circus than a church service. The novelist Stephen King, in an interview on his most recent thriller, Joyland, eulogizes the church’s simulation of “carny” culture.

"We need to recognize that it may be time to quit worrying so much about the tax code and start thinking more about the truth of the living God, and if it means that we give up tax-exempt status and tax deductions for charitable contributions, I choose freedom more than I choose a deduction that the government gives me permission to say what God wants me to say.” Former pastor and former governor Mike Huckabee speaking on the issue of religious freedom at the Southern Baptist Convention in Houston.