John March

Category: Culture

  • New Year’s Resolution: Read the Bible More?

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in , ,

    Anyone want to read the Bible more this coming year?  It’s a favorite New Year’s resolution for Christians.  Often times we start from the beginning and then get bogged down in the early books.  We give up before we get out of the month of January.   If you’re looking for a new way to…

  • Singaporeans

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in , ,

    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…

  • Primal

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in , ,

    Mark Batterson loves Jesus.  I’ve now read two of his books, Wild Goose Chase and Primal, and the portrait I get of him is a high energy (possibly over-caffeinated, he started a coffee shop) Jesus junky.  He comes across as an adventurer in pursuit of new ways to articulate God’s love. And the good news…

  • Why Power Prevents the Prophetic

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in ,

    Willimon on the problem of power if one is on top, well fixed, secure, then one can afford to be sanguine about sin.  We people in power always think of ourselves as basically good people living in a well-ordered world.  Why not? It is our world.  To such folk, “prophetic ministry” means mostly minor tinkering…

  • A Day With More Time

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in ,

    Today is Daylight savings time, that magical day when, unlike the parallel Spring day from hell, we get to add an extra hour to our night’s sleep — our clocks fall back instead of springing forward, and we are given a day with 25 hours instead of 24. Every other night we go to bed…

  • Shrewd Manager (Luke 16:1-13)

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in ,

    Last night at our Community Gathering for New City Covenant, we talked about money.  One of the passages we talked about was Luke 16:1-13.  In these verses Jesus tells a parable about a shrewd manager in order to explain why we cannot serve two masters, God and money.  You can read the parable here.  It’s weird,…

  • The Nones

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in

    Andrew Sullivan, a prolific blogger for the Atlantic, recently posted a story on the growing religious demographic called the Coming Age of the Nones.  I’ve blogged about this before (here and here).  He has some great insights.  He sets the stage with these statistics: In 1990, 8 percent of Americans reported that they had no…

  • A Fatherless Generation

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in ,

    I continue to slowly re-read Nouwen’s Wounded Healer.  This is one of the best books on Christian leadership I have ever read.  It feels like Nouwen is peering into the window of my soul as he writes and perfectly describing the human condition as I experience it. In the second chapter, he attempts to characterize…

  • A Theology of House Buying: Contentment

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in , , ,

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/shalawesome/ / CC BY-NC 2.0 We all want to be happy.  The other night I pursued happiness in my third helping of french toast (yeah, I said night; we were having brinner ;)).  The sticky, sweet goodness of french toast covered with syrup was delightful…in that moment.  But not long after dinner, I felt awful.…

  • A Theology of House Buying: Stewardship

    —

    by

    webadmin
    in ,

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/ / CC BY 2.0 I sat inside his meager thatch hut, listening to his story, told through the tears of an orphan whose parents had died of AIDS.  At thirteen, Richard was trying to raise his two younger brothers by himself in this small shack with no running water, electricity, or even beds to…