4 Ways Bad Biblical Theology Warps Sermons by Samuel Emadi
Evangelical preaching has benefited from the lectures, articles, and books reinvigorating the notion that every sermon ultimately must lead its hearers to respond to God’s free grace in the gospel. But no adjective fits better with preaching than “expository.” Why? Because faithful sermons exposit the text, and faithful exposition takes into account the text’s literary, historical, covenantal, and ultimately canonical context.
Pastoring Like a Theologian: Five Lessons from the Life of Martin Luther by B.G. White
Martin Luther was, by all accounts, an ordinary pastor — a good one, at that — and we would be misled to think that he was constantly gallivanting from one barn-burning meeting to another. He was appointed by the Augustinian order to be a professor at the unheralded University of Wittenberg, where his role included regular preaching duties. As anyone who reads Luther’s collected works can attest, his main Reformation treatises are dwarfed by volume upon volume of sermons and letters that reveal a more relational, down-to-earth Luther.
Allegiance to Scripture, Respect for Culture by Jaclyn Parrish
The challenge of cross-cultural discipleship belongs not only to missionaries but to all who call themselves Christians. Between globalization, immigration, refugee crises, generation gaps, the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, and many other cultural shifts, the world in which we live and minister is a multicultural one, whether we reside in Quito, Ecuador, or Quitaque, Texas.
The Murderous History of Bible Translations by Harry Freedman
Bible translators are still being murdered. Not necessarily for the act of translating the Bible, but because rendering the Bible into local dialects is one of the things Christian missionaries do. In 1993 Edmund Fabian was murdered in Papua New Guinea, killed by a local man who had been helping him translate the Bible. In March 2016, four Bible translators working for an American evangelical organisation were killed by militants in an undisclosed location in the Middle East. Bible translations, then, may appear to be a harmless activity. History shows it is anything but.
