The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith 

With characteristic rigor and insight, in this book Mark Noll revisits the history of the American church in the context of world events. He makes the compelling case that how Americans have come to practice the Christian faith is just as globally important as what the American church has done in the world. He backs up this substantial claim with the scholarly attentiveness we've come to expect from him, lucidly explaining the relationship between the development of Christianity in North America and the development of Christianity in the rest of the world, with attention to recent transfigurations in world Christianity. Here is a book that will challenge your assumptions about the nature of the relationship between the American church and the global church in the past and predict what world Christianity may look like.

 I'll freely admit that for the first few years of my ministry, I was teaching a grace that saved us but did not sustain us, in which the miracle happened once but it didn't happen daily. It seems crazy now. Why would God save me one day and then turn salvation over to me? That's not really salvation, is it? But that was something I had to work through, and I'm grateful that I'm very much at peace with the eternal security of the believer.

In today's political climate, and particularly in the discipline of sociology---dominated as it is by a progressive orthodoxy---what Regnerus did is unacceptable. It makes him a heretic, a traitor---and so he must be thrown under the bus.

"Dear Church. There were critical flaws in last Sunday's sermon. Please delete it from your memory. The sermon will be repaired this week and re-preached this coming Sunday."

This led to asking myself if I'd ever preached sermons that should've been recalled. And the answer was, sadly, yes. How many? Only heaven knows.

We must put humility on. This doesn't mean we fake it, but that we begin to do it, even though it takes effort. Putting on humility isn't easy. After all, it's not easy to be humble when we're as great as we are.  But it can be done.

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