These days, if you want to start a cool church, it must have a name that either a) has a “deep” meaning, b) has only the obscurest connection to Christianity, c) is shocking in its unorthodox originality, or d) could easily be the name of a Las Vegas nightclub.

That's the curious thing about the "Sunday's Coming" video: It is using "hip, cool, and media-savvy" languageto make a statement about how silly our evangelical church attempts to be "hip, cool, and media-savvy" have been. Is that the ultimate irony North Point is seeking to embody? Are they making a meta statement ABOUT meta-statement self-parody videos? I doubt it.

In recent weeks, a spate of prominent pastors have announced that they are either temporarily or permanently stepping down from the role of pastor. Here is a list of some of the big ones, followed by the reasons they've given as to their change.

At the end of the day, the path to unity requires each one of us to take a step back to critically examine our views and humbly acknowledge that we can learn from others.

Last week I had occasion to attend two Christian conferences—Together for the Gospel (T4G) in Louisville, KY and the Wheaton College Theology Conference in Wheaton, IL, which focused on the work of New Testament scholar and Bishop of Durham N.T. Wright.

Last night I attended a screening of Dan Merchant’s new Michael Moore-esque documentary, Lord Save Us From Your Followers.  It's a film about how Christians have a huge PR problem and how “the culture wars” are exactly the opposite of what Christians should be battling in this world. The real war concerns things like poverty, injustice, and loving the unlovable, suggests Merchant. If Christians just loved better, befriended drag queens, and washed homeless people’s feet, our image crisis would go away.

Christians today need to have confidence not in their own cultural dogmas or prophetic/martyrdom complexes (as in the Phelps’ insistence that God only smiles upon them and hates everyone else)—but rather confidence in Christ and his transforming, world-altering gospel.

I attended an Episcopal church one summer a few years ago. I’m not Episcopalian, but I enjoyed the church and the experience. I loved the liturgy and tradition of it—the sense of being part of an ancient, worldwide, structured body of believers. I loved the use of organ and the singing of 500 year-old hymns. I loved the creeds.

I’ve visited dozens of churches this year as part of the research for my book. I’ve enjoyed the experience, but I always enjoy coming back to my local church. I think it’s so important to be involved in a local church. I wanted to take a minute to write about the church I attend, because I think it’s a fascinating example of what a church can look like in a 21st century landscape of Christianity that is going through something of an identity crisis.

Sex scandals and evangelicalism go together like Christian Bale and rage. And it’s all very unfortunate. From Jim Bakker to Paul Crouch to Ted Haggard, we Christians are all too familiar with our leaders being caught in sex, scandal, and hypocrisy. Mostly we just like to forget that these things happen, hiding them or writing them out of the history books to whatever extent we can.

It seems to me that if Mark Driscoll and preachers like him want to talk about sex so frankly and frequently in their churches, they must at least be willing to talk as enthusiastically about the merits of single, celibate life for the Christian, or at least about how it can feasibly be done. But that may be asking too much of them.

It’s a topic that used to be taboo in church—a topic that made church ladies blush and teenagers giggle. If it wasn’t totally off-limits in a church, it was handled with great care and (usually clunky) attempts at subtlety. But not so these days. Over the last few years, sex has not only become accepted as a sermon topic; it’s become almost requisite. If you’re a pastor and you haven’t done a sex series or at least a mildly scandalous sermon on Song of Solomon, you’re behind the times.

This is the title of chapter one of the book I am writing, and it’s the underlying question of the whole thing. I don’t expect to answer it definitively in the book, but it’s a question that begs to be explored, because it’s a question that is at least latently present in all the major movements and expressions of contemporary Christianity.

Why are evangelicals so unconcerned with a church building that is aesthetically pleasing? What happened to the Christian commitment to build beautiful cathedrals and sacred spaces that architects 1000 years from now will look back upon for inspiration?