The demise of "Christendom" affects both the Church's theological dialogue and missional strategy.

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch give the historical explanation for what it is:

Christendom is the name given to the sacral culture that has dominated European society from around the eleventh century until the end of the twentieth. Its sources go to a time when Constantine came to the throne of the Roman Empire and granted Christians complete freedom of worship and even favored Christianity, thereby undermining all other religions in the empire. . .

Taken as a sociopolitical reality, Christendom has been in decline for the last 250 years, so much so that contemporary Western culture has bee…

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In this video, John Piper talks about God's care for your physical health, and for your soul ten million times more:

(Watch on YouTube)

Your eternity is ten million times more important than whether you get well now. What matters is if you get well eventually and stay well forever, satisfied not mainly by God's gifts but by himself.

One step before the details of what you believe is the question of why it matters. Simply put, what you believe matters because it's what tells you how to live—and something is always telling everyone. Kevin Vanhoozer explains:

One's life is moving in one direction or another, taking one kind of shape or another. As Pascal remarked: "Our nature consists in movement. Absolute rest is death." To the extent that we are always following some direction or other, our very lives are "indoctrinated." The only question is whether the doctrine that informs one's life is governed by the Christian gospel or by some other story, some other script (The Drama of Doctrine, [Louisville: Westminster John K…

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In A Light to the Nations, Michael Goheen explains the need to understand the nature of the Church (ecclesiology) in order to recover her missional role.

He writes:

Ecclesiology is about understanding our identity, who we are, and why God has chosen us—whose we are. If we do not develop our self-understanding in terms of the role that we have been called to play in the biblical drama, we will find ourselves shaped by the idolatrous story in the dominant culture (5).

The foundation to the Church's identity is the victorious work of Jesus Christ. He has intruded a fallen world with the dominion of a new age, died for our sins, conquered death by his resurrection, and ascended to reig…

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Reading through the entire Bible doesn't have to be a decision isolated to the first week of January. It may be something you want to start this summer.

Jason DeRouchie has recently completed a Bible reading plan that looks fantastic. It has a unique arrangement and it can be started at any time of the year.

Get a free download of The KINGDOM Bible Reading Plan (PDF).

DeRouchie lists its five distinctives:

1. Proportionate weight is given to the Old and New Testaments in view of their relative length, the Old receiving three readings per day and the New getting one reading per day.
2. The Old Testament readings follow the arrangement of Jesus’ Bible (Luke 24:44––Law, Prophets, Writings), …

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Minnesota Twins Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew died yesterday at the age of 74. Killebrew, who played from 1954–1975, was elected an All-Star 11 times and named the American League MVP for the 1969 season.

In this video, John Piper speaks about the humbling reality of death in light of Killebrew’s battle with esophageal cancer —

Watch, listen, or download the entire sermon, "You Will Never See Death."

In this video, John Piper gives two ways Jesus encourages us by the woman of Samaria:

1. God has a people out there.
2. God has a very unlikely instrument he intends to use to reach them, like us.

Romans 8:1 —

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Watch this video and rejoice over God's unspeakably powerful grace:

See this on YouTube and learn more about I Am Second.

HT: Dane Ortlund

Extemporaneous moments in corporate worship are sometimes the parts that stick with us the most. One such moment came in John Piper's concluding prayer of a recent sermon on John 8:30-36.

In this video, Piper confesses when Christians would be utterly insane:

Lord, I want to be free. I want my desires so changed into accord with reality so that I can do what I want to do and never regret it. That's what I want. And so I'm going hard after Jesus to change me, because many of my desires are stupid.

It occurs to me to say, Father, that we Christians would be utterly insane to envy people who pitch themselves out of the window of sin—on top of a skyscraper—to enjoy a vapor's exh…

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The Apostles' Creed:

. . . [Jesus] suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended into hell. . .

Jesus descended into hell? Really? John Piper answers this question [audio].

For more content on this subject, check out Calvin's explanation in the Institutes.