It's my privilege to be a staff member of Harvest Church.
Harvest is an Evangelical Free Church in Story City, Iowa.
Our church is committed to the mission of "Reaching Up" and "Reaching Out" for the cause of Jesus Christ.
As a fellowship, we first seek to reach up to God as we strive to understand Him better through the revelation he provided in the Bible.
The second component of our mission is to reach out. This first involves community as we learn to reach out to one another as fellow-sojourners in the kingdom of Christ. Secondly, it involves reaching out into the world as we seek to aid others through our kindness, character, and doctrine.
The main work area of the website is my blog. Here you will find over 300 posts about the Christian world view and scripture.
You will find other blog authors who are more profound or insightful than I tend to be. (There are links here to some of them.) Nevertheless, the observations in my blog are a modest effort to help readers give consideration to the person and work of Christ and the implications for all of our lives.
Some of the posts deal with questions I am asked from time to time about certain ideas or biblical texts. Others are reflections from events of the day and attempts to step back from the rhetoric of the moment to see how these events reflect the world view of the culture or the Bible.
Thinking-Christianly was designed to offer a place for a thoughtful interaction about the Christian faith.
This site was developed from the conviction that today issues of faith are often debated and discussed in an emotionally heated atmosphere that is toxic to the analysis of truth. Both advocates of secularism and Christians sometimes argue for their perspectives using sarcasm, name calling, distorted statistics, psychobabble, and flawed logic. One of the trademarks of the "new" atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, is provocative, ad hominem arguments. Some advocates for Christianity use similar tactics or assert that we should have faith in faith, which sidesteps rational reflection completely.
Though some may find odd proclamations or creative insults entertaining, such approaches do little to help assess whether specific religious claims are true or false. In the end, it does not matter how amusing any author or advocate's approach is . What counts is whether or not it has helped us understand truth--that is, the nature of objective reality.
In the first century, the apostle Paul argued for the validity of Christianity because it was true. He did not argue that it was popular, or that it "worked" for him or pragmatically produced a set of positive results that people desired. He maintained that Jesus was the God-Man he claimed to be, and that his mission to change the relationship between the God of the Old Testament and humans everywhere was successful. It was the truth of Christian teaching that he presented to all who would listen.
If the facts support the message Paul taught, then the implications for every human being are immense. If the message is not true and does not correspond to reality, then Christianity is a sad delusion that doesn't matter much in the end. In any case, it is worth careful examination.
Christian truth is touches all parts of life. Loyalty to Jesus and his teaching produces passion, affection, and love for Christ and his kingdom. Christianity is not grounded in those things. It begins with the claims of Jesus of Nazareth and the implications of those claims for mankind if he is the God-Man he claimed to be.
We live in a biblically uninformed age. There is often a gap between what Jesus said and taught and our popular ideas about his life and teaching. We can act on false assumptions and misunderstand the life to which Christ calls us. Even within the evangelical church traditions can take the place of facts in our understanding of the person and work of Christ. One of the goals of this forum is to help the readers, as well as myself, think carefully about the revelation of God in the Bible in order to better understand God and obey him. (See Ephesians 1:17.)