Pure Church

Pastor Paul Martin has completed his series on pastoral visitation, a great primer on a very useful topic. I commend it to every pastor thinking about these things (or who should be thinking about these things).

The title of this post says it all: A Brief Meditation on the Christ-Centeredness of Everything. Selah.

If you've not been following Nathan Finn's series on the SBC, now is the time to tune in. He's finishing the series with a two-parter on what he considers the biggest problem of all in SBC churches. Read it here. Here's a preview:

I have already alluded to this several times, but it bears repeating: I want to leave the SBC when I visit church after church after church and never hear the gospel. I hear "pray this prayer." I hear "Jesus died for you." I hear "you should repent." I hear "walk this aisle." I hear "believe in Jesus." But the significance of these things is not explained. Even worse, MILLIONS of Southern Baptists think that affirming one of these formulas has saved them, even though they have no clue as to what God has done on our behalf through the person and work of Jesus Christ. Our biggest problem in the SBC is not alcohol, or Calvinism, or bloggers, or our lack of church discipline, or even our declining baptism numbers. Our biggest problem is that thousands of our churches do not preach the gospel, many of them very large. And the sad thing is, as long as people keep going under the water, we are content to preach shadows of the gospel instead of the substance.

Over at Books and Culture, John Wilson offers his lift of the top 10 books of 2006.