The candlelight service is over, the darkened church is locked and we set out into the cold, starry darkness of a Texas Christmas Eve.
The long ride home holds its own surprises as the headlights shine on the eyes of foraging late-night creatures.
PITTSBURGH -- Dr. Kenneth Culver, a physician and Presbyterian elder who helped conduct one of the first clinical trials on human beings involving gene therapy, sees genetics, in the not-so-distant future, as "changing every aspect of our lives."
When seen through human eyes, truth comes divergently. On three separate days, just a couple of weeks before the presidential election, I happened to have back-to-back conversations with three friends of impeccable sincerity and insight.
American Christians can celebrate three Christmases. The most obvious is secular Christmas. In Pittsburgh secular Christmas has been officially dubbed "Sparkle Season." Sparkle Christmas begins soon after Halloween. Unless you become a hermit or find another way to escape the world, this Christmas is impossible to avoid.
Charles L. Moffatt, Presbyterian minister, taught me to fear no truth, for all truth is from God. The other side of that is not to be afraid to challenge any claim to truth, for not all claims to truth are from God. That is to say, the church does not have to swallow whole every new teaching that comes down the pike.
Lately it seems that we have had a resurgence in the use of the word "relevant." Everywhere I turn, someone is lauding something for being "relevant" or, more often, deriding something for not being "relevant."
There's a tune from South Ireland we used to sing around the piano that includes the question, "How is poor old Ireland and how does she stand?" Well, I've just been back to Ireland on my third Irish Institute in the past 10 years. And Ireland is old, but it is no longer poor.
MONTREAT, N.C. -- Some General Assembly Council members raised questions Saturday about the theology behind ranking the work of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) according to its impact on evangelism and discipleship -- with former General Assembly moderator Douglas Oldenburg saying, "I don't ever want us to become just a consumer church," where only programs with the strongest constituencies prevail.
Back in September, the General Assembly Council (GAC) at Montreat graded Assembly programs based on their impact according to two established priorities -- evangelism and discipleship.
With much rhetorical wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, the Presbyterian publications are full of letters and articles lamenting the process and the result by which the General Assembly Council finally got around, 17 years after reunion, to doing some of what we promised to do at the end of the first year.
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