In some churches, the words tradition or traditional are used in a pejorative sense. Anything that smacks of tradition is considered harmful to the desire to grow a large church. And since bigger is always better, tradition cannot be good.

So while I think there is nothing inherently wrong with wailing guitar solos and smoke machines as part of the worship experience, perhaps we should pump the brakes on the drive to make worship like a rock concert and the sermon like a motivational seminar.

The problem is that it is much easier to assess quantity and more difficult to assess quality. But the difficulty does not relieve us of the responsibility to have this priority.

We are not called to ratchet up the rhetoric in the culture war. We need to see how Jesus used respectful dialog to point people in a different direction.

God has buried something deep within the soul of every man and woman. It is simply and profoundly a longing for immortality.

I am grateful for the advances that have been made that increase the comfort of our existence. But, science is limited to observations of what is. Science is also limited in what it can say in response to the four important questions that man needs to answer.