One of my favorite scholars, Christopher Wright, was interviewed by the koinonia blog recently&mdashan interview consisting of the single question:

“In what way have we as evangelical Christians failed to grasp or live out the fullness of God’s missional intent? How (if at all) has our theology of evangelism been weak?”

Wright has responded by giving 5 false dichotomies where the Church has over-emphasized one aspect instead of realizing both. His insights are spot-on, in my opinion, and I suggest every check out his response in the post “False Dichotomies in Mission” part 1 and part 2.

The false dichotomies his talks about are:
1. Individual and Cosmic/Corporate impacts of the Gospel
2. Believing In and Living Out the Gospel
3. Evangelism and Discipleship
4. Word/Proclamation and Deed/Demonstration
5. Evangelism from Ecclesiology

I highly recommend the read.

Puritan Lad, author of the blog Covenant Theology, has written an excellent post on the proper celebration of Communion. I highly recommend checking this one out.

This blog post is a look at a pervasive theme in American culture that has crept into the Church at large. I am not saying this is true of every church that gathers for worship in the United States, but is something that I have noticed is a particular struggle of ours. By ours, I am placing myself squarely in my own sights.

The idea of individualism permeates American culture, if indeed we can summarize only one collective culture. Many of us dream of being the hero- the person who takes an impossible situation on our own back, beat the odds, and win the acclaim of those we save. We stress self-reliance. We relish independence. We promote our own agenda above that of others. We look out for number one, as they say. Unfortunately, this ideology also permeates the American Church.
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