About a year and a half ago on his video blog noted atheist Penn Gillette of the comedy duo Penn and Teller described being approached by a Christian in a manner that really moved him.I didn't find out about it until today. Maybe I'm late to the party, but I thought I'd pass it on.

This is a great model for evangelism that we should all take to heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JHS8adO3hM&feature=player_embedded

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“Craig Detweiler and John Marks have known each other for twenty-five years. When they roomed together as sophomores at Davidson College, they were devout Christians. It was Craig's first year in the faith, John's last.”[1]

 Craig is someone I would classify as post-evangelical. Craig became a Christian while a college student at Davidson. After graduating, he served with Young Life, went to Japan as a missionary, and later returned to earn an M.F.A. from the USC's School of Cinema/TV.  Craig recently completed his Ph.D. in Theology and Culture from Fuller Seminary and now co-directs the Reel Spirituality Institute at the school.

John is someone I would classify as post-Christian. In the Q and A which followed the screening I attended, John stated that he became a born again Christian at the age of 16. However, his Davidson experience exposed him to the wider world and led him to conclude that Christianity was too narrow an intellectual framework to contain the reality he had come to know. John remained a deist until an experience of injustice in the Balkans caused him to conclude that God must not exist. After graduating John began his career as a journalist, became a producer for 60 Minutes, and later embarked on a writing career. He recently published a book on Evangelicals written from the perspective of an agnostic called Reasons to Believe.

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The Golden Compass will debute on December 7th.  I don't normally pass these thingsRead more

Back in the early 80’s there was a documentary film about a group of juvenile delinquents who were introduced to actual convicts in an attempt to scare them straight.  The idea was to expose them to the brutal realities of prison life. In 1999 Danny Glover narrated a follow up to the piece which showed that most of the teens in the film had in fact been helped by the experience and had gone on to live happy and productive lives.

My premise this Halloween is that we are corporately trying to scare ourselves straight through horror art. I know that most people go see horror films for the sheer pleasure of experiencing an adrenaline rush followed by the relief of leaving the theatre safe and sound. But I think there might be more to it than mere entertainment. I suspect that ghost stories have been passed down from one generation to the next because they serve as warning tales in our culture.

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Some people are troubled by the recent news that Mother Teresa struggled with a 60-year spiritual emptiness so profound that on more than one occasion she doubted the existence of God.

I am not one of them.

I find the news incredibly encouraging. Because like many Christians throughout the centuries, I have also suffered through what Madeleine L’Engle referred to as “bouts of atheism.” Read more

  The other night I watched Charlie Rose interview Christopher Hitchens about his new book god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Without advocating for or against the book (which I have not read yet) I would like to point out that, ironically, the Bible agrees with Hitchens’ premise. Religion is a poison. Read more

Halloween got me thinking about why we like to scare ourselves. I wondered: What are we doing with what I’ll call our “horror art?”

Of the many potential reasons I pondered regarding the popularity of horror art, the one I found most intriguing was the idea that we’re trying to tell ourselves something. It’s my premise that we write and consume horror art because on some level, each of us knows that deep down a monster is lurking within us.

Think about it. Aren’t the scariest films the ones in which any of the main characters could turn into a monster? And don’t the monsters tell us more about ourselves than we might be willing to admit?Read more

I serve as a pastor to a lot of young urban professionals in a fairly affluent city. As a result, I get all kinds of promotional material touting the latest and greatest in Christian financial management. One of the things that bothers me about the vast majority of these products is their assumption that God wants his people to pursue financial independence. They typically mention Abraham, quote a Proverb, yank Jeremiah 29:11 out of context, misinterpret the parable of the talents, and stretch 1 Timothy 5:8 to include private school educations, cars, and trust funds. Yet most completely ignore the wealth of Biblical teaching that warns us against becoming too rich. From reading them you’d think that Jesus never told a parable about a rich fool who hoarded his wealth in an effort to acquire financial independence, only to have God take his life on the day he retired. Read more