Wisdom For Your Weekend: your weekly installment of what we’ve been reading (and watching) around the web.
Video of the Week
How Political Should a Local Church Pastor Get with His Flock? Russell Moore. As we creep closer to a November election, the question begins to come up more often: just how much should pastors be addressing politics? As we often say, the gospel changes everything, and that includes our approach to politics. There’s a balance to maintain here: we need to be clear where the Bible is clear, and allow for disagreement where the Bible is not. Moore has been a great model for evangelicals in this. His words here are incredibly wise and helpful.
Articles of the Week
Election 2016: Why Should Evangelicals Even Care Anymore? Bruce Ashford. It’s no secret that many evangelicals are exasperated with the current political climate. There are, to be sure, some diehard Trump or Hillary supporters. But many—if not most—evangelicals look to the current presidential election with disillusionment and frustration. For a while, perhaps, we thought we could make a difference and influence our nation. But now it seems like our hopes have been dashed, and many of us (myself included) are tempted to walk away. Bruce talks us back from the ledge with five reasons to stay involved.
10 Key Questions for Sermon Preparation, Darryl Dash. If you can successfully incorporate all 10 of these questions into your sermon preparation, you’ll have done your congregation a great service. These may not be easy to answer, but these are the sorts of things you should be thinking through if you want to be (1) true to Scripture and (2) pastoral to your people.
Five Things I Pray I Will Not Do as a Senior Adult in the Church, Thom Rainer. The church needs its senior adults to pour into its ministries, to provide wisdom, and to mentor the younger generation. As Thom Rainer approaches that age, he reflects on the sort of senior adult he doesn’t want to be in the church. (For what it’s worth, four out of five of these are every bit as relevant for the younger crowd. So listen up.)
Are We Distracting Ourselves to Death? Karen Swallow Prior. Neil Postman blasted modern technological culture in 1985 with Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book that claimed that television was making us illiterate and—to put it plainly—dumb. As Prior points out, technology has changed a lot in the past 30 years, but our drive to amuse ourselves with that technology has only increased. This drive has played a major role, oddly enough, in phenomena as varied as internet pornography, the popularity of Pokémon Go, and the rise of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But our lust for technological amusement is not harmless. In fact, it is literally killing us. Tremendous insight from Prior here.
On The Lighter Side
Best Volleyball Blocks Ever, with Scott Sterling, Studio C. Scott Sterling gained notoriety for his famous goalkeeping “skills.” Now he’s back, using his famed face to propel his team to volleyball stardom. The gimmick here is good, but it’s the announcers that make it simply phenomenal.
Wisdom For Your Weekend is presented to you by Chris Pappalardo, with occasional guidance from J.D. Greear. This is our attempt to reflect Proverbs 9:9: “Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning.”
