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My Own Freewill Journey

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." -- John 3:16 (ESV) I grew up in the Cumberland Presbyterian church. My friend Laird says it is Arminian in theology. I believe that is an over simplification, however, the congregation that I belonged to in Lebanon, Missouri definately believed in the "who-so-ever-will" doctrine. In most sermons I heard growing up there was a section near the end where the preacher would explain that you had a choice to make, that Jesus was standing there at door of your heart knocking, waiting for you to open the door to your heart. I developed a theology of the will. I believe without reservation that we were free to choose or not choose God and this would determine our eternal state. When I got to High School my geometry teach had a us do an exercise which he called "writing your own math, language or game". In essense, what you wou...
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Defining Emergent and Emerging

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I wrote a paper about the Emerging Church for seminary several years ago. At the time, Emergent and Emerging were not used in the same distinction as they are now. I see them as different forms of the same root, but usage dictates meaning, not history or assignment of meaning. There is an excellent article about the Emergent and Emerging church at the blog Reclaiming the Mind Ministries called Would The Real Emerger Please Stand Up . It is not clear to me where the chart came from but I find it helpful. I'm including these charts from the post here. This first chart shows the range of beliefs in Christianity. I would guess that the author would not be attempting to show that each grouping is as large or historically important as the next one, just the spectrum of belief conveniently boiled down to nice categories. Then he zooms into a section to further discuss the messiness of it all. I'm not quite sure everyone would like their assigned categories, but of course that i...
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Sermon Plagiarism is Different Than Borrowing Ideas and Illustrations

That Sermon You Heard on Sunday May Be From the Web - WSJ.com : "The plagiarism debate grew louder in recent months after a sermon site posted an essay by the Rev. Steve Sjogren titled, 'Don't be original, be effective!' Mr. Sjogren urged pastors to quit spending time striving for originality and instead, to recite the words of better sermonizers." Yesterday I bought a Wall Street Journal. I have not bought one in years but I saw a leading story on preaching and plagiarism so I spent my dollar to read the one article. Then I see that Tim Challies wrote a post on this same article. My pastor goes out of his way to source his sermon material. I think his practice of mentioning who he read to get an illustration or an idea is great. However, some people misunderstand his sourcing content that he uses from books. One fellow was intimidated by the often mentioning of book. He was of average or better intelligence but he was not an avid reader so he felt a little...
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