Over the last year, our church has been focusing some of our teaching on godly conflict resolution, or peacemaking, as the Bible calls it. Recently, our discipleship groups read works on peacemaking by Ken Sande: The Peacemaker, or the abridged version of that book, Resolving Everyday Conflict. Both books are chock full of biblical, tried-and-true wisdom for resolving conflict. I recommend both to you, especially The Peacemaker. 

But since you’ll likely have some form of conflict this week (unless you happen to be sick in bed or otherwise isolated), here are three practices you can try before your book arrives in the mail. They represent elements of peacemaking that especially resonated with my discipleship groups when we read Resolving Everyday Conflict. I find that adopting these methods really changes the course of conflict for the better. 

You may know that for the last couple of years, our church leadership has been giving attention to leadership development. One expression of that is that we have been trying to pair emerging leaders with mentors for their continued development. Since we have recently made some of those pairings, I wanted to equip those mentors with some thoughts to guide them. Here is what I’ve shared with them; perhaps it will benefit you in any mentoring relationship you find yourself in. 

In our culture we use the word “hurt”—specifically around the topic of emotional hurt. It is the common language of conflict in our culture; instead of saying to someone “you wronged me” or “you sinned against me”, we say “you hurt me”.

A few months ago our church released a new tool to help our congregation read God’s word and pray together throughout the week. It’s an app called The Reformed Hours of Prayer, which organizes our communal life around seven hours of prayer, from waking to bedtime, rotating new prayers each day of the month. I and pastor Matt worked on it with Jon Boldt and Seth Copeland, and we continue to make small improvements to it. 

As we begin the season of Lent next week Wednesday (Ash Wednesday), I’d like to offer another plug for this resource. Historically, the season of Lent is for giving renewed attention to prayer and fasting. If you’re anything like me, an existing structure and ready-made prayers help you to adopt a new practice. I’d like to tell you a bit about the app, in hopes that you will use it over the coming weeks and beyond.

In the first article of this series, I explained my desire to articulate a fresh vision for PCA churches in the Pacific Northwest for the coming generation. While the vision of the gospel-centered movement in the last generation celebrated important truths about salvation by grace in Christ alone, and inspired many to plant churches and share the gospel, it often left important practical matters of the Christian life and culture insufficiently addressed. In the article to follow, I would like to offer more clarity, particularly in the areas of worship, family, education, institution-building, and politics. This article is on worship. 

As I continue this series on eschatology, I would be completely remiss if I neglected the topic of the Millennium. Few debates on eschatology have generated as much heated debate and controversy as the question of how we are to understand Revelation 20:1-10. The passage describes a thousand-year period of time after the beast and the false prophet have been thrown into the lake of fire, during which Satan is bound and Christ reigns with his saints.

Is it a literal 1,000 years? A metaphorical period? Is it in the future, the present, or the past?

This article continues our series concerning eschatology, or the doctrines of “last things.” In this installment we continue discussing partial-preterism, now delving into the book of Revelation. When we read the apocalyptic or prophetic portions of the Bible, especially the book of Revelation, it is easy to assume that they are describing the end of the world. Yet, as we’ve discussed, these prophetic books of Scripture are anchored to God’s covenant dealings with his people in real history.