Ask people why they walked away from church, and hypocrisy is near the top of almost every list. It may be the single most common complaint leveled at both church leadership and church members. The accusation is old — Jesus Himself reserved some of His sharpest words for it — but it still empties pews…
Every organization has a social side, and that is not a bad thing. People need each other, and friendship is one of the genuine gifts of belonging to a community of faith. But something goes wrong when the social side stops being a benefit of the mission and quietly becomes the mission itself. When internal…
Let me be very clear from the start: the teaching that tithing ten percent of your income to your local church is a commandment of God is simply not true. This is not my opinion — it is what the Bible does and does not say. So the question is, why would church leaders, who…
It is a fair and honest question, and one worth asking gently: how well do our churches care for the poor? Many do genuinely good work, and most congregations are filled with kind, generous people who truly want to help. Yet when you step back and look at how the average church actually spends what…
Look closely at a broad cross-section of church budgets and a clear trend appears: churches are spending more and more of their money internally, and sending less and less of it out to causes like missions and local benevolence. This has been the direction for a long time. And here is the telling part —…
Calvinism — also called Reformed Theology, and known popularly by its best-known feature, predestination — has been spreading rapidly through Evangelical and Protestant churches, and it is one of the quieter reasons people are leaving them. For many who encounter it, the teaching raises questions they cannot reconcile with the God they thought they knew….
It is a plain and simple fact: within the majority of Evangelical and Protestant churches, men and women are treated differently. Men hold nearly all of the positions of power and leadership. In many denominations, men occupy well over 99 percent of pastoral roles. And even where men and women hold similar paid positions, studies…