Men in the church don't read well.

I don’t have statistics or studies to prove this. My conclusion draws from my experience, and from educated intuition. I recently discussed this conclusion with Albert Mohler, and he agreed, "It's a very correct and perceptive intuition." So that's something.

Of course, not all Christian men struggle with reading. Many men in the pews are very competent readers, and the church is stronger for it.

But many Christian men do struggle with reading. Here are four reasons why:

1. Men don’t read books because they don’t know where to begin. We live in a golden age of book publishing, which is great for the avid reader — but is overwhelming for many men.
2. Men…

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On January 4, 2011, on Twitter, Pastor John wrote:

Marriage. The roots are deep. The covenant is solid. The love is sweet. Life is hard. And God is good.

The quote is a rewrite of what Pastor John wrote in 2003 to Noël in the preface to his book Desiring God.

But when the quote appeared on Twitter in 2011, a woman named Patty Hurtarte copied it into her journal with no immediate purpose for it. But almost two years later she returned to the quote, used her artistic skill to turn it into a design, framed it and gifted her illustration to her pastor and his wife, Joshua and Shannon Harris.

Here's Patty’s design:

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See the previous image quotes —

• Holy Women Who Hope in God (Je…

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Timothy Keller's newest book releases tomorrow — Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work. It's a clear and thoughtful treatment of vocation and calling.

We put Dr. Keller on the line to ask him about the 9 to 5 labors into which we invest so much of our lives. So what is the purpose of our work? What if we get stuck in a job we don’t enjoy? And why does it seem the church has such a hard time getting its arms around vocation in the first place?

Click below to download or listen to Dr. Keller explain:

God’s Work and Ours: An Interview with Timothy Keller (17 minutes)

Subscribe to the Authors on the Line podcast in iTunes here.

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Previous Authors on the Line episodes…

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His plans were frustrated again by a lousy generator. No matter how many times he pulled the rope, it would not start up. He was used to his rented generators stopping intermittently during his itinerant work in these remote parts of Nigeria, but tonight was the first time a generator wouldn't even start.

There was no time to find a new one. The open field was swelling with more than one thousand Nigerian villagers. Word of his coming had clearly spread, as natives walked some distance to gather together and fill up an open area of dusty common land that spread out from between the mud huts, a plot of land and a village so desolate it has not yet been photographed in any detail by Google …

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We don’t often talk about our daily enjoyment of God with our friends — a deficiency J. I. Packer picked up some years ago when he compared this trend to the Puritan age:

Communion with God was a great thing; to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology — but rarely of their daily experience of God. (215)

This seems accurate. And to combat this current t…

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From Rob Lister’s forthcoming book, God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Crossway; Nov. 30), pages 255–256:

In the aftermath of the fall, we do not hate sin as we ought, nor do we pursue righteousness as we should. Instead, we dabble with sin. Given a moment’s reflection, we recognize how foolish it is to dabble with sin. But because of the weakness of our affections, sin dabbling is what we love to pursue, apart from the grace of God (cf. 2 Thess. 2:9–10).

God’s ethical transcendence, then, is not one of dispassion, but of perfect passion. . . . God is eternally, transcendently, and unshakably loving in the intra-Trinitarian fellowship. The intra-Tr…

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In the new episode of the Authors on the Line podcast, we put Dr. Albert Mohler on the line to discuss Christian leadership in the secular world and to talk about his new book, The Conviction to Lead: 25 Principles for Leadership that Matters (Bethany House, 2012).

I asked him to address ten specific topics, and all of them are listed below.

To listen to or download the podcast, go to the podcast page in iTunes here, or click on the following link:

Christians Leading in the Secular World: An Interview with Dr. Albert Mohler (21 minutes)

• It has been alleged by some that the modern church has failed to equip businesspeople for day-to-day decision making. Is that true?
• In your book y…

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In modern cultures like America, every Christian is faced with the problem of homosexuality. Churches are pulled into the tension, too, because “there is no demilitarized zone in the homosexual debate.”

Shrugging isn’t an option. The implications are all around us, in schools, in politics, in denominational tensions, and — maybe most importantly — in determining how the Church lives out her faithful witness to a culture in desperate need of Christ.

With the marriage amendment on the Minnesota ballot, and with a growing list of personal questions in my Moleskine notebook, I contacted Dr. Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a man who has for m…

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Why do we attend church on Sundays? Fundamentally, we come to church starved for God. Coming with our need, we seek God in our worship and in hearing the word faithfully preached. We arrive at church with a God-sized appetite for spiritual pleasures that only the Living God can fill.

But is it honorable to find our motivation to get to church in seeking blessing from God? Or is that a selfishness that spoils the whole morning and embarrases God? Isn’t it more honorable to arrive at church with disinterested motives?

Pastor John says no. Here’s why.

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who died in 1804, was the most powerful exponent of the notion that the moral value of an act decr…

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Any woman who willingly delivers her baby in a harsh and dilapidated hospital in Djibouti is a brave mom. That was Rachel Pieh Jones’s experience on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 when she delivered her daughter. Rachel wrote about her incredible story for The New York Times earlier this year (“A Child of Two Worlds”).

But Rachel will be the first to tell you she is not brave to raise her three kids in Africa. She’s no tiger mom, or brave mom, but a “desperate, breathless, dependent” mom.

While Rachel was stateside, we asked her about parenting in Africa, and she explained why “brave” is not the right word for what she does (3-minute clip):

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Other resources from Rachel Pieh Jones —

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