This past weekend at Eastbrook Church, I continued our series “Light for the City” with a message entitled "One New Man-One New Community." This message explored Ephesians 2:11-22 where Paul describes the new community that God has created in Jesus Christ from both Jews and Gentiles. I organized the message around five points: Sin and …
Are We Radically Welcoming?
This morning while studying in a coffee shop, I got into a conversation with a guy sitting next to me about church. He was a follower of Jesus, but had some hang-ups with church and previous experiences. Let me say that he was not a young guy but a middle-aged guy , so he's not …
What I Learned from ‘Leaving Church’ (pt 3)
What if the church was ‘more like a way station than a destination’? When I first became a Christian, I read an article by J. I. Packer that introduced me to the idea of the church as a hospital. The gist of Packer’s thought, as I recall, was that church is a community where we …
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What I Learned from ‘Leaving Church’ (pt 1)
When a friend recommended a book to me called Leaving Church, I was surprised by two things. My first surprise was that the book was written by one of the best preachers I have ever heard, Barbara Brown Taylor. But the second fact surprised me even more: she had left vocational ministry after a considerable …
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“To the Suburban Churches of America” (Eugene Peterson)
It's no secret that I love the writings of Eugene Peterson. I was scouring through Christianity Today's web-site looking for an article on another topic altogether when I ran into this 1999 article by Eugene Peterson entitled "To the Suburban Churches of America." As a pastor of a basically suburban church, all that I can …
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Matthew Erickson 