Less than a Fool

Visiting Asbury Annette and I drove to Asbury University last Saturday, about 5 hours from our house. The last few miles of the trip were through beautiful countryside and Kentucky’s famous horse farms. As we crested the last hill before the small town of Wilmore, we caught sight of the university chapel with thousands of people in line and on the lawn. We turned and stared at each other, unprepared for what we had just seen. We stayed in town until about 3:00 PM on Sunday. As we were leaving Sunday afternoon, we saw cars lined up for miles on the two-lane road that led to the university. The crowd size had doubled since we had arrived 24 hours earlier. This photo from currentpub.com shows the amazing growth of the revival in just 10 days. How did it start? Wednesday, February 8 began as a normal day at Asbury University in Wilmore, a town of 6,000 people in central Kentucky. The students went to the mandatory chapel service where they sat through an unremarkable, forgettab...

  The problem is not really with the Old Testament – the problem is with the church’s understanding of the Old Testament. Here are a couple examples of what I mean. ·          The Bible class was about Israel’s conquest of the land of Canaan. God commanded Israel to wipe out the Canaanites because they were so evil. “Christians sometimes overemphasize God’s love,” the teacher said. “Everyone wants to talk about love, love, love – but we have to remember that he’s a God of judgement too, and he hates his enemies.” ·          The sermon was about Elisha cursing 42 boys so that two bears came out of the woods and mauled them. “We have to respect God’s spokesmen,” the preacher said. “Even though they were only boys, they deserved death because they mocked God’s messenger.” This is the type of faulty reasoning that I see all the time, and it comes from an over-reliance on the Old Testament as a sou...

What religion is growing twice as fast as Christianity in the United States? What religion will overtake Christianity as the most populous religion in the world by the year 2050? The answer is Islam . Muslims comprise about 1% of the American population, but in 30 years their population in the US will double to 2%. Also, they’re young ! Although 40% of American adults are younger than 40 years of age, 60% of Muslim adults in the US are younger than 40. But the most interesting thing to me about Muslims is that they’re the easiest people in the world to witness to. I haven’t witnessed to every demographic, but among those that I’ve witnessed to, Muslims are the easiest. Muslims don’t have a great reputation among American Christians. They’re often associated with terrorism because, it’s true, the 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, and a minority of Muslims still want to destroy Christianity and Western society. But that ideology is rare among Muslims. About 3/4 of American Muslims ...