The latest edition of “The Weekend Wanderer” is here with John Wesley on preaching, Iranian conversions in Turkey, evangelicals of color & the religious right, persecuted Christians, and so much more.

My final blog post on Eugene Peterson’s outstanding book on pastoral ministry, Working the Angles: “Practicing Spiritual Direction.”

Apocalyptic Christ: a poem.

An Advent Prayer of St. Augustine of Hippo.

The latest edition of “The Weekend Wanderer” is here with Fleming Rutledge, #ChurchToo, pressure on Chinese churches, why internet church isn’t real church, and so much more.

When studying yesterday I came across these powerful reflections by John Oswalt on Isaiah 9 related to Jesus’ wholistic mission and the Church.

I appreciate your prayer support today as I continue working on messages for this coming weekend of Advent on Daniel 12, Christmas Eve services, and a Student Ministry retreat in January on having undivided hearts. @EastbrookChurch

In light of preaching from Daniel’s apocalyptic visions during Advent, I couldn’t agree more with Fleming Rutledge in “Why Apocalypse Is Essential to Advent”.

Wendell Berry on the wisdom of simplicity from The Hidden Wound.

The December 15, 2019, edition of “The Weekend Wanderer” is here with gospel music and worship wars, Facebook’s maformation of our lives, Asher Imtiaz, Stephen Colbert’s conversion story, books, and more.

Spiritual direction is the task of helping a person take seriously what is treated dismissively by the publicity-infatuated and crisis-sated mind, and then to receive this “mixed random material of life”…as the raw material for high holiness.”

Eugene Peterson on spiritual direction in Working the Angles. More on that here as part of my ongoing posts as I read through that book.

There are a lot of albums that I return to often, but one of the constants is Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks. The whole thing is a delight, and I never tire of “On the Nature of Daylight.”

I’m continuing my reflections on Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles at my blog with attention to Peterson’s call for pastors to serve as spiritual directors.

Josef Pieper: > The prerequisite for justice is truth. Whoever rejects the truth, whether natural or supernatural, is at that point truly “evil” and unrepentant.

A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, p. 21.

I spent a lot of time this past week thinking about imagination and its relation to faith. It eventually became the first part of my message on Daniel 9, which I slightly re-worked here: “A Faith-full Imagination”.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux: “if you prepare your interior ear … and keep your inner senses open, this voice of your God will be sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.”

For your weekend enjoyment, the latest edition of “The Weekend Wanderer” is here with Fleming Rutledge, Andrew Brunson, the end of Christians in the Middle East, Presidents and the Lord’s Prayer, and more.

I appreciate your prayer support as I work on message preparation for the next three weekends at @EastbrookChurch on Daniel 9, 10-11, and 12. There is so much in these chapters that the challenge is particularly strong today as I try to gain clarity. Pray I don’t get distracted!

“The Pastor as Guide on the Spiritual Quest” - the eighth part of my reflections on Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles.

No one should be misled into taking my footnotes as either proof of, or invitation to, scholarship. They are here to remind the reader of the rich harvest of memorabilia—rocks, fauna, and flora—which a man has picked up on repeated walks through a certain area, and now would like to share with others. They are here mainly to encourage the reader to venture into the shelves of the library and experiment with distinct types of reading. ( In the Vineyard of the Text, 5)

I loved preaching Daniel 8 at the beginning of Advent with my message “Faith Looking Forward”. I looked at the empires of earth and the spirit of antichrist, and how “the darkest hour is just before the dawn.”

The latest edition of “The Weekend Wanderer” is here, featuring Jo Saxton on narcissism, a bivocational refugee pastor, the death of John Allen Chau, Christopher Tolkien, redemptive fiction and more.

“Finding Peace: Isaiah” - the first week’s Sunday reading for our Advent devotional at @Eastbrook Church.

Choosing Hell: W. H. Auden on Charles Williams’ view of Hell.

I appreciate your prayer support today as I map out messages for the four weekends of Advent that coincide with finishing a series on Daniel at @EastbrookChurch on apocalyptic imagination and exile faith. Thank you all so much!