This Week on Trans·formed (9/08)

Featured Articles on Trans·formed This Week

So, Isn’t it Time You Start a Family? Kari and her husband have been trying for four long years to conceive a child; the beautiful spontaneity of their love is becoming a clinical task: taking temperatures, counting days, running tests and more tests. Month after month there is a new disappointment with no baby to look forward to. Theirs is a deep, personal, and private pain. Infertile.  Barren.

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Going For It. What happens when the day comes you leave the work you have poured yourself into? It may seem an irrelevant question for students preparing for their life work. But how you approach life now will go a long way towards how you answer this. If we avoid risk and unfamiliar terrain in our early years, we will most likely play it safe in our latter years. But if we are willing to step out of our comfort zone at each phase of life, we will find that risk always offers both fear and hope. And hope energizes calling and invites us to become.

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Other Articles on Trans·formed This Week

• Learning about Sanctification from Dostoyevsky. In this 5-minute video, David Powlinson reflects on what he’s learned from reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky about sanctification and ministry. If you like literature and ministry, it’s worth checking out.

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Other Posts of Interest from around the Web

• Trading the Good Word for Good Deeds. In the past 10-15 years, younger evangelicals in particular have become more involved in issues beyond gay marriage and abortion, such as being good stewards of the environment and addressing social ills like poverty and homelessness, notes Dan Olson, a professor of sociology at Purdue University, who’s written about church congregations and religion and politics.

• How Jesus Changed the Way I Study. In the middle of this intense season of study, something miraculous happened. As I read about how Christ pursues his bride, the church, my pragmatic lens to study was shattered powerfully, and for the first moments of my life that I can remember, I stopped thinking about myself and started marveling at God.

• In Praise of the Clash of Cultures. I did not convert to Islam, nor did my Egyptian friends become atheists. But I learned an important lesson from our discussions: that I hadn’t properly thought through some of the most basic convictions underlying my way of life and worldview — from God’s existence to the human good.

• Ministry in the Middle Space. The same doctrinal foundations seem to be producing two completely different sets of ministry expressions. How can that be? And is it even a bad thing? Because the answers are not obvious, we draw two common but wrong inferences.