Next time you open your Bible, don’t only ask, “What would Jesus do?” and try to do that thing. Ask, “What does this passage tell me about how wonderful Jesus is?” We need to be worshippers, not only activists. 

What would Jesus do? It has turned up on bracelets now for decades, and many Christians find it a helpful thing to consider. After all, Jesus was without sin, and if we want to live a life that pleases God, surely Jesus is a useful example! And yes, of course we see aspects of Jesus’ life on earth that we should follow. The way Jesus interacts with people, the humility he showed, the confidence in prayer; all of these are things we would benefit from reflecting on.
Yet, if this is the main way we think about Jesus, it is clearly not enough.
Let me explain. I heard a sermon recently where the preacher was explaining Mark 10:46-52. That’s the passage where Jesus healed the blind man outside Jericho. After getting Jesus’ attention, Jesus asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?” After saying that he wanted to see, Jesus healed him, and the man went on to follow Jesus.
The main application the preacher drew from this was that we should notice those people whom others might not, the disabled, the quiet, the ones with problems. And we should ask them what we can do for them. In doing this, we are being like Jesus. That is a valid application of Mark 10, sure. We should do this. The world would doubtless be a better place if we were more observant of the downtrodden and moved to help them.
Read More

Faithfulness in ministry may mean displeasing a colleague, a mentor, or a training group that embraces more pragmatic methods. If our solitary aim is to please him who enlisted us (2 Tim. 2:4), we will do well. Faithfulness is its own reward.

In The Devil’s Dictionary, the satirist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) defined dishonesty as “an important element of commercial success” (p. 85).
While this definition is cynical, it’s not wrong. One can only wonder what Bierce would say if he witnessed the state of today’s church.
You don’t have to look far to see dishonesty in the church. In the US, concert music and TED-style talks take the place of reverent worship and faithful biblical exposition. Across the globe, roaming “apostles” skip from one downtrodden, developing nation to another, lining their pockets with each staged signs-and-wonders crusade.
But the problem isn’t only external—it’s not just the bad guys and heretics out there. The problem lurks in our own hearts.
It’s the small-town pastor who, rubbing shoulders with bigshots at a conference, puffs his chest and rounds up when asked about his church’s weekly attendance. It’s the nonprofit that parrots the world’s marketing lingo of inclusiveness and “justice” to hit that Gen Z target audience. It’s the overseas worker tempted to cook the books on the “decisions for Christ” column in the annual report—after all, who would know?
Few of us are above these temptations. We must diagnose the problem. But we must also take great care to not misdiagnose it.
One common diagnosis is pragmatism.
We are too utilitarian—we do what we think works. We tweak our language to avoid gospel offense. We offer entertainment because it seems to grow the church, reasoning that more bodies in pews means more changed lives. We focus on results more than faithfulness.
But a missionary friend of mine recently challenged this diagnosis. “Pragmatism isn’t the problem,” he told me. He has seen similar problems firsthand in the Islamic world, where pioneering missionaries in risky countries, backed by enthusiastic supporters, face daily temptation to exaggerate the fruit of their efforts.
Read More

The Waldensians likewise sprang from a reform movement. They arose around Lyons in the twelfth century and spread into southern France and north-western Italy. They too ran afoul of the Inquisition. (Waldensian Protestants continue to live and worship in northern Italy. The Italian author Bruna Peyrot, who in 1997 wrote an historical novel about Durand, Prigioniere della Torre, is a Waldensian.)
All of this means that long before the Reformation, the Vivarais, the Durands’ home region in the south which roughly corresponds to modern-day Ardèche, bore a strong bent towards cultural separation from the north, religious non-conformity, and political autonomy.
If the south of France felt a sense of proud geographical and cultural autonomy from the north, a great many in France as a whole felt a proud sense of religious autonomy from the Pope and Italy. This divided the late-medieval French church into two groups. The Ultramontanes—literally “over the mountains”were fiercely loyal to the Pope, who resided across the alps in Italy. The opposing Gallicans resented the church being ruled by distant Italians and preferred all things Gallic, French. (Gaul is an ancient name for France.) Needless to say, French monarchs were proud Gallicans, and in 1516 Francis I secured the Concordat of Bologna, which removed the right to appoint senior church positions in the French church from the Pope to the French kings.
The other big social movement that played such a key role in the rise of French Protestantism was the fourteenth and fifteenth-century European Renaissance, which means “re-birth.” Beginning in northern Italy, great minds and artists looked to recover and build upon the achievements of Classical Greece and Rome. This brought tremendous developments in painting, sculpture, music, architecture, historical and textual scholarship, literature, mechanical invention, and political theory.
Renaissance flowered in fifteenth-century Europe into Humanism, a scholarly movement which looked ad fontes, “back to the sources.” From the time of the Crusades, ancient books and parchments flowed into western Europe from Palestine and southern Europe. Scholars strove to grasp the thought of the ancients by mastering their languages—especially Greek, Hebrew, and classical Latinand by searching for and copying and comparing the oldest manuscripts that they could get their hands on.
Gutenberg’s development of the printing press around 1436 supercharged the whole Humanist project. It permitted the cheap, massive, and rapid multiplication of books and pamphlets and the ideas they carried. Western European scholarship was shaken by the content of this tidal wave of fresh thought and the exhilarating spirit of personal intellectual responsibility, of searching out the truth for oneself.
The re-examination of the biblical texts in their original languages sparked a major rethink of Christian thought and practice. A German Augustinian monk at the University of Wittenberg, who was lecturing in the early sixteenth century on the Psalms, Galatians, and Romans, rediscovered the Bible’s teaching about the way of salvation. The teachings of Martin Luther, and especially his recovery of the biblical doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith in Christ alone, began to be debated in France in the 1520s. Luther’s critique of the papacy and all things Rome appealed to those with Gallican tendencies. They also appealed to a growing intelligentsia with a newly acquired taste for self-education and the new humanism.
Reformation in France was sparked in Paris in the 1520s in the diocese of Meaux around bishop Guillaume Briçonnet (1472–1534), the humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1455–1536), and the brilliant author Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), sister of the French King Francis I. There was however one great figure who would far eclipse them all.
Visit the 1909 Monument international de la réformation, built into the wall of Geneva’s Old Town, and you will see among the granite statues of such Reformers as Guillaume Farel, Theodore Beza, and John Knox, a five-meter-tall representation of John Calvin. Calvin’s figure stands slightly forward of the others and dominates the monument.