Articles and resources to help you help people connect to God.

Here is this weeks collection of interesting links and articles from around the internet:

Six Questions to Ask When Studying the Bible in a Group – “Reading the Bible in community can be challenging, but it can also be deeply rewarding. The Bible gives us resources for the relationships in our groups that we would never have otherwise. It speaks into Christian community with unparalleled authority and relevance.”

Be With and Become – “Unfortunately, most people’s experience of Christians or pastors has repellent effect. We can tend to be overly talkative, pushy, judgemental, and lousy at being present and truly listening. Francis Schaeffer said, “If I have only an hour with someone, I will spend the first fifty-five minutes asking them questions and finding out what is troubling their heart and mind, and then in the last five minutes I will share something of the truth.” We need to cultivate an ability to be truly present with people and really listen.”

The Deadly Truth About Loneliness – “We continue to underestimate the lethality of loneliness as a serious public health issue. Contemporary tools such as social media, while seeming to promote social connection, favour brief interactions with many acquaintances over the development of fewer but more meaningful relationships. In this climate, the challenge is to address loneliness and focus on building significant bonds with those around us.”

Gospel Gratitude Through Panic Attacks – “In a hotel gym while on vacation with my family, I stepped down from the treadmill to stretch, and found myself flat on my back—vision blurred. I reached for my phone to ask for help—thankfully I could. My sister helped me unglue from the ground and wobble to the elevator. Physically, I was not hurt—just weak. But mentally and emotionally, I had suffered from the incessant message from my body that my time on earth must surely be over soon, and from sudden lack of ability to fully direct my mental state. I had experienced my first and worst panic attack.”

Transitioning to a Spiritual Conversation – “God has placed you — deliberately, with intentionality — in proximity to people He is seeking to restore to Himself, people He wants to be developed to their full potential, so they can take part in His plans for the world around them.”

Here are some interesting articles from around the internet for you to enjoy:

1. How to Turn Down the Volume of Your Anxiety – “Every Christian wants to know God more; few Christians fight for the silence required to know him. Instead, we spend our days smashing stillness-shattering, knowledge-destroying cymbals on our ears and in our souls. And with so many gongs and clashes in our lives, it can sometimes be difficult to isolate and identify them. So let me help you do this and then provide some mufflers.”
2. Loneliness may be a greater public health hazard than obesity — and experts say it’s getting worse  “As more people opt to live alone, delay or forego marriage, and recede into their smartphones, rates of loneliness are skyrocketing in the United States, according to new research. … Holt-Lunstad’s research shows loneliness could pose an even greater threat to public health than obesity, and other research has found it even rivals the risks of smoking.”
3. Don’t Just Read Alone – “Communal reading has a prestigious pedigree running from Moses through Jesus (Luke 4), Paul (Acts 17), the early church (Col. 4), and beyond. Yet many Christians today read little and gather infrequently. How can we retrieve this great tradition and reinstitute this important spiritual practice?”
4. Everybody’s Eating Alone – “Eating among company is healthier than eating alone in a number of ways, especially if we begin in childhood. A September paper from the Vanier Institute of the Family reports that “family meals are associated with a variety of beneficial outcomes for youth,” everything from literacy to better mental health to reducing the risk of substance abuse.”
5. The Teaching Gift – Turbo Charging Transformation – “Teaching inspires action that ignites transformation that informs understanding. … Teaching goes beyond just instructing or modeling the content of God’s word. Obedience to the word is as much caught as it is taught. Teaching is a means of doing until you know something well enough to teach it to someone else. The art of apprenticing comes to mind.”

Here are some interesting and useful articles from around the internet this week:

1. Why Arminians Should Celebrate the Reformation – Matthew Pinson – “So why should Arminians like me celebrate the Reformation? Because Arminius did. While he disagreed with some of the reformers on how the gospel takes hold on people’s lives, he was zealously Protestant in his articulation of what the gospel is and in his desire to reform God’s church according to God’s Word.”
2. 8 Signs Your Christianity is Too Comfortable – Brett McCracken – “Why is it important that we avoid falling into comfortable Christianity? Because comfortable Christianity is far from the costly, inconvenient, idol-crushing, cross-shaped path for disciples of Jesus. Comfortable Christianity has little prophetic to say to a comfortable, consumerist world. Comfortable Christianity has little urgency in mission and little aptitude for growth.”
3. Too Much Information – Alec Rowlands – “We want details re: the future… so that we can remain in control of our future. We may never say it or admit it, but our desire to know and be in control of our future comes from the fall and Adam and Eve’s desire to be independent from God.”
4. Help! No One is Listening – Christine Wanstall – “For those of us who are ‘prophet’-shaped, one of the challenges of working out a mature expression of our calling and ministry is dealing with the frustration of not being listened to. How do we keep our hearts right?”
5. Must Every Christian Be a Member of a Local Church? – Brian Davis – “It’s completely foreign to the Bible for a Christian not to want to be a part of a local church.”

Here are some fun and interesting things from around the internet this week:

1. When Prophets are the Enemy of the Prophetic – “So it’s a sobering thought that often the biggest barriers to releasing a healthy prophetic culture are the prophets themselves. All too often the thing that stops people engaging with the gift of prophecy is the immaturity and unhelpful behaviour of prophetic people.”
2. Research Reveals the Five Biggest Influencers on Your Child’s Spiritual Health – “What do you think makes the biggest impact on a child’s spiritual development? Dinner as a family? Parents who don’t miss special events? Having church friends? Being at a good Christian school? Being at a church with a vibrant kids and student ministry?”
3. To Defeat Your Sin, Look at Jesus – If you are focused on your sin, you will run as one being chased. You will always be looking over your shoulder, and you may be overtaken. To win the race, focus on the goal—but the goal isn’t defeating your sin. The goal is Jesus Christ, who has already defeated it. “
4. The Attractional Church’s Trojan Rabbit – “But something distressing happened. As if to unwittingly prove the dictum that what you win people with is what you win them to, increasingly, the gospel of Christ’s finished work became relegated to the end of a service, almost an addendum to to the real focal points of the goings-on, and then it frequently became pushed to the end of an entire message series, eventually became saved just for special occasions, and ultimately has been replaced altogether by the shiny legalism of moralistic therapeutic deism.”
5. I love this video of the Montreal Gospel Choir for more reasons than I could possibly explain:

Here are some interesting articles from around the internet this week:

1. Our Culture Eulogizes Hugh Hefner and Enables Harvey Weinstein but Eviscerates Mike Pence – Owen Strachan – “… the same media that condemns Weinstein (after helping cover up his apparent crimes) is the media that eulogized Hefner. As I read the reports about the Miramax producer, and read the half-hearted indictments of Weinstein by various famous personalities, I could not help but think back a few months to the furor surrounding Vice President Mike Pence, who famously does not have meetings alone with women who are not his wife. Pence, by his own confession, abides by this policy because he is a Christian man who wishes to honor God, protect his marriage, and not put the women he works with in a compromising position.”
2. An Open Letter to Those Suffering From Depression – Shona Murray – “My dear friend, I’m so sorry to hear that you are suffering with serious depression. Although you feel hopeless and helpless, I want to assure you right up front that there is hope and there is help. I’ve been there myself and I’ve felt the same despair and darkness that you feel. But God, in his great mercy, brought me out of it and I trust and pray he will also bring you into the light.”
3. Seriously, Why Jesus and Not Socrates – Dan DeWitt – “Both had disciples. Both taught radical, culture-shaking things. Neither wrote anything personally that we have today. Both died for what they believe. So, why Jesus and not Socrates? Here are three reasons …”
4. Four Ways to Attack a Sense of Entitlement – Eric Geiger – “A sense of entitlement can greatly harm the culture and the mission of a ministry or organization. A sense of entitlement is corrosive and crushes the collective soul of the team. Those the team is designed to serve become less and less important as self-centeredness reigns. When entitlement spreads, the ministry or organization acts as if it exists for itself instead of for others. As white blood cells attack sickness in a healthy body, a sense of organizational entitlement must be attacked. Here are 4 ways: …”
5. Context is Key – Thabiti Anyabwile – “I can’t seem to escape this week’s news cycle regarding Sgt. LaDavid T. Johnson, his wife, Myeshia, and the phone called placed by President Trump to this grieving widow. So I’ve turned the news off. But I can’t help thinking I should learn from this situation as a pastor. … As I’ve reflected on the last couple of days, it seems context may be the biggest key in being helpful–or at least not harmful.”