Keeping Kids Christian Launch
Keeping Kids Christian was released on February 24th! Unfortunately, I was sick this week and missed posting on the launch date. You can find the book for over 30% off with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com and Westminster Books, and can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christianbook.com.
It was wonderful to see such nice reviews by Nadya Williams at Mere Orthodoxy and Austin Gravely at The Gospel Coalition. An excerpt from its seventh chapter also ran at Christianity Today.
The Vanishing Church and Faith Retention
My essay “How Do Our Kids Stay Christian?” has been included in Mere Orthodoxy‘s inaugural ebook, Spiritual Formation for the Family. If you become a member of MO you have access to this and all future ebooks. That essay was the origin of Keeping Kids Christian, which is published in one week! You can find it for pre-order with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com; on pre-order and 40% off at Westminster Books (it was WTS Books’ promotional focus last week, which was cool and humbling); and for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christianbook.com.
Ryan Burge is the guru sociologist of religion who writes at Graphs about Religion. I’ve followed and appreciated his work for years now, and have read all of his books. His most recent is The Vanishing Church. It explores the decline of the mainline tradition and its central thesis is that the moderate sensibilities of mainline congregations couldn’t handle the increased polarization of American culture and that very sensibility is something desperately needed to moderate the most extreme impulses in our society, both religious and secular. It was classic Burge: lots of statistics that are easy to digest, the familiar recounting of the American religious landscape over the last 75 years, with the vulnerability of a pastor whose church shut its doors.
What left me scratching my head was how he contrasted mainline with evangelical sensibilities when it comes to Christian discipleship…
Meals and Wine and the Lord’s Supper
There have been two recent articles lamenting deficiencies in evangelical communion practice. The first is from James B. Jordan (republished from 1993) where he suggests that since the sacrament is a meal it is best served at a table. In the second, Brad East argues that (fermented) wine is the appropriate drink for the sacrament, not (unfermented) grape juice. I am sympathetic to both of their arguments and generally agree with the larger exegetical and theological work in their pieces. However, I think the conclusions that biblical consistency and obedience require sitting at a table and drinking real wine aren’t necessary, even if those practices might be most fitting.
First, every Christian agrees that if Jesus tells his church to do something then we are to do it. And every church that partakes of the Lord’s Supper agrees that Jesus’ establishment of the sacrament on the night of his betrayal is normative to some degree. What from that evening is required for the sacrament to be legitimate?…
