The following articles have been selected because they are informative, instructive, entertaining, or simply interesting. Articles appearing in Your Friday Five do not represent an endorsement.
Another victory at the Supreme Court for religious groups, By Jessica Gresko
WASHINGTON (AP) — In another victory for religious groups at the Supreme Court, the justices on Thursday unanimously sided with a Catholic foster care agency that says its religious views prevent it from working with same-sex couples. The court said the city of Philadelphia wrongly limited its relationship with the group as a result of the agency’s policy.
Preach to the Outer Edges: Who Are You Forgetting?, By Lexham Press
Most preaching is aimed at the people in the middle. How do we preach to the outer edges so those people can feast, too?
Scripture Is a Feast, Not Fast Food, By Aimee Joseph
“Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. While I can’t relate to the irony of a sailor feeling parched when surrounded by water, the phrase captures a feeling with which I’m all too familiar. We live in a society and an era in which words are ubiquitous, yet so often I’m starving for life-giving, deeply significant words.
How to Hear a Sermon, By Bob Kaylor
With summer finally here, a lot of us preachers will be heading out on vacation … or at least we should be! That means you may have an opportunity to sit in someone else’s church and hear them preach during your time away. It’s not always an easy thing to do for those of us who write and present sermons every week. Preachers tend to be a critical lot who have a hard time listening to sermons they’re not preaching. We are prone to evaluate the setting, the exegesis of the text and the preacher’s mannerisms with the critical eye of a homiletics professor when we’re supposed to be simply receiving the word of God being offered to us.
The Good and the Bad of Losing Cultural Christianity, By Trevin Wax
Earlier this spring, I took part in the “Culture Friday” segment on The World and Everything In It podcast. We discussed the Gallup “Houses of Worship” research that showed—for the first time in the eight decades of this survey—religious Americans to now be in the minority. Only 47 percent of Americans claim membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque.