Every Sunday, we’ll be posting articles and links that are saying something important about church, culture, and mission. Here’s what resonated with us this week on the web:

Church & Theology

Rachel Held Evans shares an excerpt from her upcoming book, Searching For Sunday:

It’s strange that Christians so rarely talk about failure when we claim to follow a guy whose three-year ministry was cut short by his crucifixion. Stranger still is our fascination with so-called celebrity pastors whose personhood we flatten out and consume like the faces in the tabloid aisle. But as nearly every denomination in the United States faces declining membership and waning influence, Christians may need to get used to the idea of measuring significance by something other than money, fame, and power.

In this sermon clip, Greg Boyd endeavors to explain hell in a nutshell:

 Is hell for real? Is it what we have been told it is? Does an all-loving God really torture people there forever? These are a few of the questions that Greg Boyd touches on in this weeks sermon clip.

John Frye writes at Jesus Creed about closing a church:

As the ministry entered into its final two years, issues in the church’s DNA, frictions with members, and the inability of the church to negotiate healthy change, the church entered into what our denomination calls an “at risk” status. Using a medical metaphor, the church went into cardiac arrest and was on life support in the last eight months to a year. It’s hard to get a church on life support to become more missional. Energy levels drop and morale flounders. I came to a hard realization: churches do die and this one was dying under my care.

News & Views

Matt Smethurst at The Gospel Coalition asks Tim Keller what’s on his bookshelf:

What’s on your nightstand right now?

I’m reading Augustine’s Confessions very slowly in two different translations and using a commentary on the Latin by J. J. O’Donnell. I’m reading a bit every night using all of those.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes at The Atlantic in response to The Ferguson Report:

Darren Wilson was given the kind of due process that those of us who are often presumed to be gang members rarely enjoy. I do not favor lowering the standard of justice offered Officer Wilson. I favor raising the standard of justice offered to the rest of us.

Scot McKnight responds to Brian Zahnd’s recent post about America and the Church:

Brian Zahnd, that prophet-like pastor and author on the edge of Missouri, is no stranger to calling American Christians to distinguish between America and the Christian church. It’s not that he wants Americans to abandon the country and head north to Canada or south to Mexico. No, he wants us to grasp that what we often think is “Christian” is only Americanism conceived as Christianity.

Favorite Podcasts

N.T. Wright on the RELEVANT podcast.

Scot McKnight on the Seminary Dropout podcast.

Alan Roxburgh on the Fresh Expressions US podcast.

Partners & Resources

Discover How Fresh Expressions Really Begin, by Fresh Expressions US.

How Crisis Reveals Your Spiritual Gifts, by V3 Movement.

On The Missio Blog

On the blog this week, we continued our ongoing series on the topic of #TrulyHuman:

VIDEO: #TrulyHuman Plenary Speaker MaryKate Morse On Stewarding Leadership And Power, by Missio Alliance.

How Does The Church Differ From America?, by Brian Zahnd.

What Happened When I Stopped Being A Senior Pastor, by Karina Kreminski.

Primped: Letting Our Hair Down As Leadership, by A.J. Swoboda.