It’s beginning to look a little like Christmas. You know what that means? Bell weather. During the Christmas shopping season (known liturgically as “Advent”) men and women brave the cold to stand outside stores, ringing bells and collecting change for the Salvation Army. It’s...

I’ve been tutoring a friend of mine in the history of the U.S. Constitution. He’s homeschooled, but he lost parent-as-teacher privileges for being too cheeky or something. So now he’s being punished by having me and several other novices as his teachers. So at least he’ll learn...

“You keep talking about a relationship with God,” said the woman, a fixture of the church and in pretty much all my church activities. “I don’t understand how that works.” Part of my problem, of course, was that I had been simmering in an evangelical subculture for nigh...

[Editor's Note: This week, we are going to be running excerpts from David Zimmerman's new work, The Parable of the Unexpected Guest. You can read Part One here. David is an editor at IVP Books and a columnist here at the Writers Collective. Follow ongoing adventures with the unexpected guest on Twitter...

[Editor's Note: Over the next three days, we are going to be running excerpts from David Zimmerman's new work, The Parable of the Unexpected Guest. David is an editor at IVP Books and a columnist here at the Writers Collective. Follow ongoing adventures with the unexpected guest on Twitter at @unexpguest.] Part...

It’s not often that you encounter a living legend. I managed to encounter two in one week recently: I flew to Pittsburgh to see U2 at Heinz Stadium, and I drove to Chicago to see Sir Paul McCartney at Wrigley Field. (Jealous? I thought so.) It’s not like we hung out or anything; these were entirely...

The other day a woman I didn’t know got out of her car, ran up to me and told me the following: “Hi, I’m Lauren. God–you know, God?–told me to tell you that he loves you, and he’s proud of you.” That was not what I had been expecting. At first I thought she wanted...

It’s almost a sure thing, a guaranteed bestseller: Why do bad things happen to good people? Every tragedy or calamity, every natural, unnatural or supernatural disaster, every act of terror or act of God–without fail the Amazon rankings reflect the spike in interest in why there is suffering,...

People don’t study the Bible anymore. At least that’s the prevailing opinion of a lot of people I know. By “people” I mean my colleagues in Christian publishing and my friends in Christian education. By “people” they mean not the Old and New Testament scholars, the...

I used to lead a small group in a megachurch. I would go to these training sessions to brainstorm solutions to common problems. The one that we small group leaders always came back to–the one that got all the laughs–was the “extra grace required” guy (or “EGR,” for...