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In this fifth installment on James Houston’s The Mentored Life we (Scot McKnight and Brad Bergfalk), we will look at his first “positive” chapter, chp 5: Mentored and Discipled Christian Living. Summary The chapter is largely a statement of Kierkegaard’s theory of the development of the self. In essence here it is: “He [Kierkegaard] interpreted…

For a long time in my teaching career I have worked with these two terms (salvation vs. discipleship), especially when it came to the teachings of Jesus on ethics. It permits good discussion about both the gospel and “the bottom line.” I’ve given up these two terms as a template through which I process the…

I’ll be daily blogging (starting one week before Advent) about Advent to record some thoughts about Gospel texts and how they can be used to foster our readiness for Christmas. It would be fun to get some involved in this so we could all work on it together.

Pastors have a nearly impossible task. Especially pastors of mega-churches. Because they are asked to do so many things, speak at so many other functions, and render judgment on nearly everything that comes along, pastors can develop one of two orientations: humility about the task or what I call “P-Bics”: Pastors of Big Churches Syndrome.

Of all the crosses I see on churches, I like the Methodist cross the best: a cross, an empty cross, with the sign of the Spirit surrounding it. Can it get more complete? You computer folk could do better than I, but here is a link to one.

I promise not to blog (much) about the gospel in the immediate future, but it is a topic so central to what we do (and believe) that it deserved some attention. On top of its importance, I’m trying to give Embracing Grace a bit of a context. The gospel is easy to distort and I…

Summary (Brad Bergfalk) Houston moves from describing the “Heroic Mentor” and the “Stoic Mentor” to what he calls the “Secular Psychotherapeutic Mentor.” Houston asserts that the “therapeutic mentor” is the most pervasive of the three in American culture. The “therapeutic mentor” finds its embodiment in the psychoanalytic revolution of Sigmund Freud and later Carl Jung.…

George Barna, in his new book Revolution, claims the primary source for the new generation’s spiritual formation is shifting away from the local congregation model to a more fragmented model. That is, we get what we need from the sources we know about, but not all of them (or even the primary one) is our…

Because I was hearing so much chat about Barna’s new book, Revolution, I thought I’d read it. Here’s the nub of the book: there is a revolution going on in the Church (big “c” not little “c”), and it concerns how to live out the gospel in the context of the Church. His contention is…

We’ve been visiting family in New Hampshire this weekend where we had a wonderful time. My niece attends the University of New Hampshire, and we went with her parents; we stayed in a B&B in York Village near the coast. Lots of fun and always nice to have a cup of chowda for lunch. I…
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