John March

Category: Church

  • Winter Wonderland

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    I sit at my desk watching the snow rapidly accumulate. It sounds like this will be a storm for the ages as some experts predict as much as a foot and a half will fall! In just a few short hours our world has changed into what it’s meant to be. It has become both…

  • Singaporeans

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    Oh, how I love them!  I just dropped of a friend, Gerald Wu, at the airport today.  He’s a Singaporean college student who just finished up a semester as an exchange student at the University of Minnesota.  We were introduced over email by a mutual friend.  Gerald happily jumped on board with our church plant…

  • Love Jesus but not the Church?

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    It’s pretty en vogue these days to say you love Jesus but you don’t think too much of the church.  It’s understandable.  When Jesus walked the earth, he did some pretty amazing things.  He also taught with a wisdom that was unique to what anyone had ever heard.  Both in word and in deed, Jesus…

  • The Church for the Good of Others

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    This is an excerpt from a post written by Erwin Raphael McManus at the Origins Project site: When researchers try to break down what is happening at Mosaic, far too often they see the skin and miss the heart. They see nine gatherings in seven locations, and so we are a multi-site congregation. Or they…

  • Sobering Statistics in the PC(USA)

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    There are some sobering statistics about the on going flight from church reflected in a recent report released by the Presbyterian Church in the USA.  Here’s the money quote: LOUISVILLE — Membership in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) fell by 69,381 in 2008, the Office of the General Assembly (OGA) has announced in its annual statistical…

  • Seeing Faith Through the Eyes of Others

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    My article on authority in the Evangelical church, which is reposted here from its original post on patheos, a website for interfaith dialogue.  My article was a part of the Evangelical perspective answering the question “Who Speaks for Us?“ Early in my Christian experience I spent some time at a church that would have been…

  • The Myth of a Christian Religion

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    In the book The Myth of a Christian Religion, Greg Boyd explores what he understands to be the true calling of the church and the ways religion often gets in the way.  He argues that the true calling of the church is to represent and proclaim the Kingdom of God, which he defines as: the Kingdom…

  • The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity

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    Soong-Chan Rah argues powerfully that the evangelical church in America is held captive to Western (he means white) culture.  He points to the models of ministry held up as ‘successful’ at conferences and in publishers’ catalogs as evidence that American evangelicalism glorifies the white suburban church as the epitome of what church should look like. Throughout…

  • Evangelical Church is at best treading water

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    This chart displays graphically the inflow and outflow of people in various religious groups in America.   This graph is taken from a post by internet monk.  It was compiled from two surveys recently released detailing the state of religion in America.  The most influential is the Pew Forum study Faith in Flux.  The upshot…

  • Emerging Church Perspectives

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    I’ve heard a friend say that defining the emerging church is like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall.  It doesn’t have any formal institution or maintain a set of doctrines or membership requirements.  It is, when defined by its adherents something of a conversation that is categorized more by ethos than doctrine.  The people who are a part…