Pilgrims' Home

Let’s keep Bell’s book in perspective I finished Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins . I hadn’t read any reviews of his book prior to reading it myself, yet now I am amazed to see the prolific responses. Online respondents either seem to overly sympathize with him—“finally, someone has taken on this monumental issue that is consuming the faith of young and old, alike. Most, however, have responded the other way – exaggerating Bell’s devilish and heretical qualities; one blogger noted that Bell’s book has created a TSUNAMI in his community. I think overly romanticizing Bell’s contribution is a bit much, but more so comparing Bell’s book to a recent natural disaster that has threatened nuclear meltdown and innumerable deaths is out-of-bounds, also. I wonder if we, Christians, will find a way to debate texts, ideas, and questions without having to follow media’s personalist attacks. The one person who seems to always accomplish gracious speech is Scot McKnight . He is one worth hearing,...

We just concluded a series on friendship at Harbert Community Church. As preachers, it was a profound series, and we hope the same is true for the hearers. I was curious as to what was the primary grammars of friendship operating throughout our series. I used wordle (www.wordle.net) to configure the word picture of each sermon as well as a composite of the weeks together. I will post three of the weeks, along with the current composite. The worship services from this series will be posted sometime this week on the church website: www.harbertcommunitychurch.org The weeks of the series were as follow: Week 1: Friendship Week 2: Trustworthy Friendship Week 3: Generous Friendship Week 4: Critical Friendship Week 5: Friendship Failures Week 6: Reconciling Friendship Wordle for the Series Week 2: Trustworthy Friendship Week 4: Critical Friendship Week 6: Reconciling Friendship