I became a Christian in the mid-1970s. The winds of cultural change were already evident in good old America. Even though it had long been a nation which operated on Judeo/Christian morals and values, Progressivism had been doing its work slowly in universities and amongst politicians for 60 or 70 years. Even though the nation has a sort of a Christian hangover, still generally holding biblical values in the main, it was cultural but not necessarily tied to any embrace of biblical faith. The Barna Research Group recently released its material on America’s Most Bible Minded Cities. The statistics were not overly surprising to me but rather served to confirm something we at MCOI have said for quite a long time. We need missionaries to America! In fact we did an article in our Journal in 1999 titled, of all things, Missionaries to America? A little more than a decade later, in 2011, I revisited the topic in Missionaries to America – Deux. I won’t reprise either of them today but do think Barna’s research demonstrates something we have raised on more than one occasion. The church, for all of its attempt at remaking itself in order to have a broader appeal, has lost its sense of mission and as a result its impact on and influence in culture. Continue reading …

I had a phone call last week in response to one of the Snarky Apologist YouTube videos about Jehovah’s Witnesses. The caller started, “You are really mean in your presentation. Can’t you focus on issues without attacking others?” I listened and didn’t point out the obvious, that they were emotional and attacking me. After a few minutes I responded with a stock statement I have been using for years now, “You may be right. I may be mean. I may even be short and fat but the real issue is, where are we wrong?” The caller hesitated for a moment, not sure what to do with the response. I then pointed out that the video did address actual issues and even though they became emotionally worked up over the material that doesn’t mean that we resorted to an emotional attack devoid of facts. We ended up talking for nearly an hour and they are in the process of verifying a number of issues we covered.

A few days later I had a call from someone that has been reading our book on Bill Gothard. The caller said they really had wanted to drop by the office to talk because they wanted to tell me face to face that our writings are mean-spirited and even though they disagree with Bill Gothard that does not mean we should be so mean-spirited in the way we write. After listening for a while I responded with Continue reading …

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it or so it is said. I think there is a great deal of validity to this thought. The sexual revolution of the 1960s has made fairly big changes in the thinking of culture in the area of accepting sexual behaviors which had been regarded as deviant or at the very least, outside of the norm 50 years ago. Marriage was monogamous between one man and one woman for life. Sure, there were divorces but families in that situation were thought of as “broken” and the children were from “broken homes” signifying a less than ideal home life. Men and women may have “affairs,” sex outside of marriage but these relationships were regarded as wrong and most tried to hide them. These “ideals” are diminishing as the church continues its pursuit of trying to be acceptable to culture rather than speaking to and influencing culture and it is likely this trend will continue. In many ways we live in a book end of time. The time we live in now is more like the 1st Century than any other time in between then and now. The church transformed the way culture thought of themselves, God and their place in the universe. This included the area of sexuality.

The founders of Chic-Fil-A took a pro-traditional marriage position and Chicago Mayor, Rom Emmanuel worked to prevent them from opening a store in Chicago claiming that their traditional view of marriage “were not Chicago’s values.” The disregard for traditional marriage by the mayor surprised a few but passed with barely a ripple. Marriage is now being defined merely as two people, regardless of gender, entering into a legal union being called marriage. Continue reading …

There is a game being played in discussions between Atheists and Christians without most of us realizing it. Let’s call it the Genocide Ante. In order to make out that the other side is worse for the world, both sides start comparing body counts. It starts when someone asserts that religion or atheism is more immoral. Of course both sides are sure its obvious that there is more blood on their opponent’s side than their own. Sometimes its a more subtle version of this game that gets played. The debate may be about which worldview Christian or Atheist is the most consistent morally. Either way, someone starts comparing body counts and atrocities. Usually its the atheists that insist its absolutely obvious that Christianity is as Christopher Hitchens claimed, a violent and evil system responsible for untold deaths and lots of nastiness. Almost always the Crusades are brought up.

Sure that Christianity is responsible Continue reading …

As I sit here on a very snowy New Years Eve here in Quincy IL, it occurs to me that we have had a great year here at MCOI.  Somewhere along the way, the Lord has added to our numbers. Some of those people have found the Facebook page through the blog but more likely it was the other way around. We have currently 195 people and organizations that “like” us in the Facebook kind of way at least. We’ve had some stimulating discussions. We’ve raised a few eyebrows and hopefully the tenor of what passes for public debate. Not bad for a little outfit that operates on a shoe string budget (and if you know where we can sell these shoestrings for some actual money, please let us know!).

So in the tradition of . . . well,  every prime time morning TV show, let’s hop into the way back machine and take a look at some of the memorable posts from this year.

By far the biggest topic this year was the election. We had several posts and though MCOI is a non-partisan organization, we are not ostriches with our head in the sand. Don started us off this year with what he dubbed the first political question of the season in “‘Tis the Season to be Political”: Continue reading …