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A Feast of Church Music

The Reason Why We Sing THE REASON WHY WE SING HEATHER JOSSELYN-CRANSON ORDER OF SAINT LUKE, 2016 $20 (PAPERBACK) 210 PAGES I choose and play worship songs for a living. Every year I listen to hundreds of new songs – weighing and sifting those that I hope and pray will be both a blessing and faith forming for my congregation – the community of Hope College. Most of this is a joy – achieving and arranging being two of my…
February 28, 2018
Essays

Plan A

We’ve all heard a story that goes something like this: In the beginning God created a beautiful and perfect universe. To crown his creation, he made humanity in his own image. Human beings were perfect and immortal. Life was serene and wonderful. There were no predatory animals and no death. But then came the Fall. Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s command and plunged creation into decay, destruction and death. The perfect creation was ruined. Now God had to come up…
Daniel Boerman
December 30, 2017
Reviews

Justice: It’s God’s Thing

The Justice Calling THE JUSTICE CALLING: WHERE PASSION MEETS PERSEVERANCE BETHANY HANKE HOANG, KRISTEN DEEDE JOHNSON BRAZOS PRESS, 2017 $18.99 (PAPERBACK) 240 PAGES Two thousand years after the greatest act of injustice, when the only truly innocent man was crucified, modern day Christians are still debating the call to do justice in the local and catholic church. To say that The Justice Calling is a timely gift to the contemporary church is a profound understatement. Why? The Justice Calling lifts…
December 30, 2017
Essays

Though There Are No Grapes

In late April two years ago, I changed the tires on my van, installing the summer tires once again – not such a memorable event and one that I had done also exactly six months earlier. On October 31, 2015, my wife and I had just put on the winter tires and, in all aspects, it was a typical fall day. The two of us were at home with our younger son, getting our property ready for winter. She had…
December 30, 2017
As We See It

How Karl Barth Almost Ruined a Perfectly Good Sunrise

I am in the Black Hills of South Dakota, alone and in the dark, waiting for the sunrise. In the twilight before the bright ball of the sun peeks over the horizon, scattered cloud formations already announce its arrival, and I realize how clouds ought to get more credit for their part in this morning spectacle. Deep, warm colors gradually cool and brighten as the sun climbs and appears over a distant hill. But even as the sun arrives, the…
December 30, 2017
Essays

Choosing between Culture-Making and Soul-Saving

We stepped out of the car into the grassy, gravel courtyard of the evangelical Ethiopian church. We were very late for worship; today was the feast of St. Gabriel, and we had been stuck in traffic as hundreds of Ethiopian Orthodox churchgoers walked past our stranded car, streaming by in their traditional white robes. That was them, this was us: We were evangelicals, and we were going to an evangelical church, a distinction of great importance, we were told. We finally arrived…
December 30, 2017
Poetry

To Martin, on His Wife, the Original “Opt-Out”

Soren Kierkegaard once said Martin Luther might as well have married a “wooden plank” Katherine, Kette, hidden in herring barrels, driven into town to hunt a husband, of all the renegade nuns, so young, eyes roving from the cloister, she refused to be “placed,” so you wed her. Doctor Hammer-in-Hand, you were never a “sexless log,” six children and a hoard of orphans clustered in the Black Cloister homestead. Nowadays, Katie’d be a keeper – queen of sustainable living, herbal…
December 30, 2017
Poetry

I Come

Charlotte Elliot No one wants to come just as they are to the Lord. Only children, who go just as they are to anything – rumpled hair at the wedding, shoes on the wrong feet at Grandma’s. Too young to have learned better, to carry a disapproving sneer to their closets and mirrors. We come to the altar with bloodied knees and hands, we come to the Lord praying “Just as I am” And maybe, yes, it is possible to…
December 30, 2017
Essays

Faithful Betrayal

As a professor at Northwestern College, I don’t find it uncommon for my students to raise questions or share perspectives that motivate me to rethink my own views. The rethinking I have in mind right now was sparked by a conversation with a student shortly after her graduation. She had enrolled in seminary and just finished the required reading of Peter Rollins’ text The Fidelity of Betrayal. She loved the book and encourage me to read it, suggesting I would…
December 30, 2017