As you consider planning the route to health, there are two statements we believe would be beneficial for you to keep in mind, perhaps even post on your desk to remind you of their importance...
Six Lessons Learned from Adopting a Church (A Real Case Study)
Several years ago, Sam Rainer led his church to adopt a struggling church in the same town. He wrote the lessons he learned one year after the adoption. Thom interviews Sam about these lessons that are worth recalling.
Webinar: Why the 1990s Changed Everything in American Religion
What if the most important decade in recent American religious history was not the 1960s, the Moral Majority era, or the pandemic years, but the 1990s? In this webinar, Ryan Burge and Sam Rainer examine the decade when religious affiliation, church attendance, and generational religious identity began to shift at a pace the United States had not seen in modern times. Using General Social Survey data, this webinar shows why the 1991–1998 period was a genuine inflection point, especially among young adults, and why many of the church trends leaders are dealing with today were set in motion during that decade. Church leaders will learn how to interpret the long arc of religious change, separate myth from measurable reality, and think more strategically about ministry in a post-1990s religious environment.
One Consequence of Methodism's Pilgrimage to Respectability: Did Divisions Result in a More Well-to-Do Denomination?
Dr. Albert C. Outler, an important teacher and mentor for me from seminary days until his death, understood and appreciated the conventional reasons given as causes for divisions over the years. However, he saw something else going on across these breakups. He found that most schisms in American Methodism were rooted primarily in matters of “ethos,” and “social, ethnic, and structural issues.” Historian Nathan Hatch takes this assessment further in saying that even in the division of the northern and southern churches in 1844, “fault lines of class, education, and social status within a single denomination may have been more significant than sectional tension, even between northern and southern churches.”
While theological and social issues were obviously factors, it is useful to consider the extent of class in historical divisions. It appears that Methodism began what Hatch has appropriately called its “pilgrimage to respectability” by the 1840s, when the Methodist Episcopal Church had become the largest denomination in the country.
Has the Episcopal Church's divisions produced a more elitist denomination, one out of touch with a large segment of the US population?William Augustus Muhlenberg at 150
In 2027, the Episcopal Church will mark 150 years since the death of William Augustus Muhlenberg—priest, educator, reformer, and one of the most important figures in the history of Episcopal education. His name remains attached to schools, hospitals, and institutions. Yet Muhlenberg’s lasting significance lies not primarily in what he founded, but in the theological priorities that shaped his work: above all, the belief that education is one of the church’s central means of forming persons for leadership, responsibility, and service to the world.
Should the ACC Endorse the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals? Answer 2 of 3 The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC-19) will convene in Belfast, Northern Ireland from June 27 to July 5, 2026. This essay is the second of three essays each responding to the same question, Should the ACC approve the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals? Answer 1 of 3 may be found here. Each essay brings a very different perspective and a different answer. Readers may also wish to see a series of essays on the NCPs which appeared on Covenant in 2025 and another series evaluating the Abuja Affirmation which appeared on Covenant in 2026.
An ACNA Provincial Council 2026 primer
This is an important and exciting week for the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Representatives from across our province head to Tulsa next week for Provincial Council. Representatives to Provincial Assembly will join for a virtual Assembly just a few short days afterwards. In my dual capacities as Chair of the Governance Task Force (GTF) for the ACNA and Director of Anglican Governance Ministries for the American Anglican Council, I wish to provide a primer on five canonical matters to be considered and address some of the various concerns that have been raised in recent weeks.
It’s a noteworthy event when a new Steven Spielberg film comes out. The master of cinema has produced such masterpieces as Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler’s List amongst his 37 films. Two of his major films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and ET-the Extra Terrestrial, have looked at the theme of visitors from outer space. His latest, Disclosure Day, released this summer, returns to that theme.
I have to admit what intrigued me was the claim made by some that Spielberg thought this would cause Christians to rethink their faith. It turns out that he made no such claim – he actually asked a broader theological question - “Is God only the God of this planet, or the God of everywhere life might exist?".
Honesty about Our Habits
Moral and spiritual disaster is usually the result of a long pattern of laziness, worldliness, and neglect. Men do not go to bed faithful and focused Christians and wake up the next morning as apostates. Apostasy is incremental, slowly moving away from the standard, a series of small compromises, each one based upon the previous, until one day you wake up and wonder how you ever got so far from where you were before.
Life is like swimming in a river. You cannot simply tread water and stay in one place. You are either exerting yourself in order to swim upstream, against the current, or you are being driven downstream by the forces that surround you. We are becoming more like Christ or less like him, every day. We are resisting the flesh or relenting to it, dying to our sin or dying from it.
Don’t Just Settle for Youth Ministry. Embrace It.
Local churches need youth pastors committed to more than two-year ventures. They need leaders who have a long-haul discipleship vision, who don’t merely settle for youth ministry but embrace and commit to it. Why should youth ministry leaders pursue longevity in their ministry roles? Here are several reasons.
5 Lessons We Learned from Launching the Energize Youth Ministry Conference
Youth leaders came to be inspired—and ended up inspiring us as well.
The legislative process of the ACNA bears a striking resemblance to the "democratic centralism" of the Soviet era Russian Communist Party. Its "wheel of provincial review" is cosmetic. The bishops vet all legislative proposals made by the governance task force and the governance task force gives more attention to input from the bishops than it does any other source. Note Andrew Rowell's denigration of floor amendments and parliamentary debate, procedures which recognize that the bishops are not the only stakeholders in the ACNA and which give a larger role to the clergy and laity not only in the legislative process but also in the determination of its future direction.Disclosure Day: What does Spielberg’s latest film tell us about the Church?
It’s a noteworthy event when a new Steven Spielberg film comes out. The master of cinema has produced such masterpieces as Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler’s List amongst his 37 films. Two of his major films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and ET-the Extra Terrestrial, have looked at the theme of visitors from outer space. His latest, Disclosure Day, released this summer, returns to that theme.
I have to admit what intrigued me was the claim made by some that Spielberg thought this would cause Christians to rethink their faith. It turns out that he made no such claim – he actually asked a broader theological question - “Is God only the God of this planet, or the God of everywhere life might exist?".
Honesty about Our Habits
Moral and spiritual disaster is usually the result of a long pattern of laziness, worldliness, and neglect. Men do not go to bed faithful and focused Christians and wake up the next morning as apostates. Apostasy is incremental, slowly moving away from the standard, a series of small compromises, each one based upon the previous, until one day you wake up and wonder how you ever got so far from where you were before.
Life is like swimming in a river. You cannot simply tread water and stay in one place. You are either exerting yourself in order to swim upstream, against the current, or you are being driven downstream by the forces that surround you. We are becoming more like Christ or less like him, every day. We are resisting the flesh or relenting to it, dying to our sin or dying from it.
Don’t Just Settle for Youth Ministry. Embrace It.
Local churches need youth pastors committed to more than two-year ventures. They need leaders who have a long-haul discipleship vision, who don’t merely settle for youth ministry but embrace and commit to it. Why should youth ministry leaders pursue longevity in their ministry roles? Here are several reasons.
5 Lessons We Learned from Launching the Energize Youth Ministry Conference
Youth leaders came to be inspired—and ended up inspiring us as well.
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