This week Chris Lyons, and Tim Reed discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of big churches and small churches especially in relation to the Willow Creek studies. Click here to download it, or listen below.

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 Justice and Mercy #16 - Big church, small church: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dan Kimball talks about hell:

I started the sermon giving some examples from pop culture of how we generally portray or think about hell today – from Far Side cartoons with a red devil and pitchfork, to AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” song and then showed a clip from an episode of Seinfeld which is the one where Puddy (Elaine’s boyfriend) becomes a “Christian” and listens to Christian music on the radio but then he emotionlessly makes comments to Elaine how she is going to hell and he isn’t. He then asks her to steal his neighbors newspaper and he says something like “you’re the one going to hell not me, so you might as well steal it”. And then she explodes and starts whacking him with the newspaper and says: “If I am going to hell, you should care that I’m going to hell.”

One of the big complaints from watchdoggies about our e/e brothers and sisters is that they don’t talk about hell enough. I’m not sure that’s true, but what is true is that when we talk about hell we need to have the proper attitude.
Kimball continues:

But if we do believe in hell, and we believe that people are created in God’s image who would then be experiencing judgment and hell – it should make us grieve, and hurt, be in great concern, care, praying, and doing whatever possible we can to be on the mission of Jesus living out and communicating the gospel to people.

Sadly, the people I see and hear talking about hell the loudest don’t seem to have this attitude. Instead, often, it comes across as an attitude of superiority.

I’m feeling quite under the weather today, but I found myself a bit amazed that I completely agreed with Dan Phillips at TeamPyro – in two articles, nonetheless! – on the subject of religion in politics.

Religion is stacking up to be quite the topic during this election cycle. When questioners bring up the matter of religion, or try to pursue it very far, one of the common preferred responses is, “My religion is very private. I keep it separate from my politics. My religion will not influence me one way or the other in office.”

What’s surprising about this paint-thin response is how often it works. I suppose we can thank the mainstream media’s abysmal ignorance of and incuriosity towards religion or philosophy for that.

This response — if it means anything at all — can only mean one of three things:

1. The speaker is a liar
2. The speaker is a hypocrite
3. The speaker can’t rub two live neurons together

Here is my premise: all men are religious, and all worldviews are religious worldviews.

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that Dan stole Rob Bell’s notes from last year’s Everything is Spiritual tour.  Regardless, he has some good observations on the topic of candidates who try to distance themselves from their religion…