I'm a naturally curious person. I like to find things out, investigate, and dig into obscurity sometimes. I did this with AI recently. Not because I needed to or had some desire to make my writing something. But because I wanted to see what would happen. To be honest, I wasn't fully ready for the response I got. A few months ago I fed a machine about four years of my own writing. Sermons, blog posts, the odd half-finished thing I never published. Then I asked it for a paragra

I was asked to preach at a wedding a few years back, and the couple wanted Ephesians 5. Every pastor who's done more than a handful of weddings knows the particular flinch that request produces… half honor, half dread… because you know you're about to stand in front of a room that's heard this passage wielded as a leash far more often than they've heard it preached as love that empties itself to the point of death. You spend the drive over rehearsing how you're going to get t

I attended a Christian Nationalist dinner and discussion the other evening. These were guys that I have genuine love and respect for. Fathers, friends, pastors, scholars, etc… and I get why they hold the line that they hold. It makes sense. But I disagree on the means to the end. Hopefully love and respect can be had, even though I don’t agree with the platform or the way to and through towards a desired goal. The food was delicious and the conversation was profitable, on mul

There is a hard truth that we need to discuss. The word “church” has been used to cover so much ground. So many buildings, brands, movements, institutions, scandals, revivals, and slow declines. “Church” has become almost semantically empty. When I say “the church,” I am aware that you may be picturing something you’ve been hurt by, something you’ve left, something you’re still in but barely, something you love and are watching die. I am picturing all of those things too. Wh

Somewhere around the end of the first century (possibly earlier, possibly overlapping with the later New Testament documents) someone wrote a short document for a Christian community that needed to know how to function. It covers baptism, fasting, prayer, the Eucharist, how to welcome traveling teachers, how to discern a true prophet from a false one, how to elect local leaders, and how to live together in a way that actually looks like the Kingdom. It is called the Didache (

Let me say upfront that I am not doing the easy version of this argument. That’s a little too disingenuous for my taste. The easy version goes: Constantine made Christianity the religion of the empire, the church got comfortable, and everything went downhill from there. It is satisfying, for sure. But it is also too simple, and the fathers who lived through it and after it were more complicated than that reading allows. Athanasius spent much of his life being exiled by empero

There is a argument you will hear in certain Reformed and conservative evangelical circles that goes something like this: “the miraculous gifts of the Spirit: tongues, prophecy, healing, the whole charismatic portfolio, were given to authenticate the apostles and establish the early church, and once the canon of Scripture was complete, they were withdrawn. God, having finished his point, moved on to a more orderly arrangement.” It is a tidy argument. It is also, historically

I sat in a church service a few years ago and I watched three thousand people consume a production. The lights were right. The transitions were tight. The pastor was engaging, visibly humble in that practiced way, and the whole thing moved like a well-oiled machine toward its predetermined emotional landing. Nobody was unkind. Nothing was technically wrong. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching something that had almost nothing to do with what Irenaeus meant wh

The Anarchist Church and what that means.

The beginning of a 7 part series that is my vision statement for my church and the future of the church.

I have been getting up at 5:45 in the morning to exercise. Not for any other reason than the sheer guilt that I feel in the afternoons...

Recently, Alistair Begg advised a grandmother that he didn’t believe that she would be sinning if she were to attend a same-sex marriage...

It’s that time of year again. Where we celebrate the holidays and gather with our families and friends, open gifts, drink weird...

Well, I’m officially a doctor now. Dr. Scoggins still sounds odd (I don’t know if I like it, really). And I don’t know exactly what do to...