PCA Conversations

You can click here for a description of the main event from Thursday at the General Assembly.
We want to know your reaction. How did you feel about the defeat of the minority report? What do you think it means for the PCA? (Please remember our guidelines for charitable speech on this forum.) If you were [...]

by Josh Eby
All Christians desire to become more like Jesus.  All Christians long for our world to become more like heaven.  And all Christians struggle to figure out how to live out their faith in the midst of a changing and complex world.
On the one hand, we make the mistake of identifying Christianity with our [...]

by Mike Farley
The Eucharist contributes to spiritual formation not only by nurturing the growth of virtues but also by embodying practices that train us in the ways of Christ and conform us to His image.  It is ritualized practice of life in the kingdom of God.
In their works on spiritual disciplines, Dallas Willard and Richard [...]

by Mike Farley
Eucharist contributes to spiritual formation by cultivating virtues that conform us to the image of Christ.  Faithful participation in the Lord’s Supper ought to instill a particular set of dispositions toward God, other people, and the whole created order that reflect God’s purposes for us.
The Supper trains us to be humble.  It does [...]

by Mike Farley
In recent years, American evangelicals have shown increasing interest in viewing the Christian life as a process of “spiritual formation,” and they have sought instruction and literature and practices to pursue spiritual formation from an increasingly broad range of Christian traditions—Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic.  Authors like Richard Foster and Dallas Willard have led [...]

by Greg Thompson
[Continued from Part 1 and Part 2]
This brings me to the final animating conviction, and it is this: one of the most urgent civic tasks before the church is the recovery of civic love.
That is to say, even more important than our positions on public policy, or our decisions for political candidates, is [...]

by Greg Thompson
[...continued from Part 1]
The second conviction has to do with the current poverty of our civic presence.
What I mean by this is that in spite of the richness of our civic and political vision we in the American church are quite far from its embodiment. There are a number of reasons for this [...]

[Editors: One house-keeping note before we get started. In response to feedback from our readers we are going to reduce our posts to 2-per-week for the time being. Hopefully this will give everyone more time to read and ponder the posts we do put up, and possibly increase the opportunity for conversation in the comments [...]

by Greg Thompson
It’s a sort of truism that if you are looking for conflict, there are few ways more certain to provide it than talking about religion or about politics.  And more than that, to talk about them together is akin to a sort of social kamikaze—a reckless and self-destructive endeavor that can only end [...]

When PCA Conversations began we asked the five speakers from last year’s Denominational Renewal conference to each contribute one post that related generally to their assigned topic from that conference. So far you’ve read Jeff White on Mission, Jeremy Jones on Theology, and heard Matt Brown on the topic of Ecclesiology. Today we present Greg [...]