♪ To whom is the church accountable in terms of evangelism, outreach, social justice, discipleship, and leadership development? Clearly, it is primarily accountable to God in obedience to the instructions of Scripture. Do conference boards and leadership have a right to speak into this area of the life of the church?

♪ ALEX IS THE boy nobody wants in their class. He’s in grade two and has seemingly limitless energy and zero attention span. His comments and questions are never on topic, and everybody is convinced that he is learning nothing. He’s usually facing away from the teacher, making faces or jokes as they try to teach, and the end of the year is a relief because he is finally somebody else’s problem.

♪ WHEN I ENTERED the academic world recently, I noticed changes in Christian education I had not been aware of. I had not realized education had become so focused on leadership development. Across Canada’s Christian colleges there are now academic degrees in leadership, reams of Christian books written on leadership, and faculty whose sole role is to teach leadership development.

♪ AT THE BEGINNING of this year, I read that DaySpring, the greeting card company, had a Word of the Year Quiz on their website. By selecting a few personal descriptors and Bible verses that resonated with me, I could find a pre-baked, pithy word to construct my life around for the next 365 days (366 with the leap year).

Winter’s first semester was warm, erring on the side of balmy. Albertans tentatively accepted the lingering fall weather, painfully aware they’d been fooled before by the sudden arrival of a tsunamic dump of snow or a frigid pop quiz.

Imagine an EMC time-traveller from the 1920s visiting us today. Would they find any clue that, of all the churches in town, this was their descendant?

One of the many gifts children give us adults is the freedom to be childlike again. There is nothing more freeing than running in a gym playing pool noodle tag. (The fact that I couldn’t keep up is neither here nor there.)

“16 million,” my son places his rent card on the discard pile. Grandpa’s brow furrows. “How did you get that?” My son points to his colorful wild cards.

We’re sitting on a gold mine. The world is gasping for it, and we have it, though we don’t always grasp its biblical beauty.

“Stand back,” the guide told me. “Just a little bit further.” I was carefully examining a rich blue shard of stained glass as the midday sun lit up the walls of the magnificent 18th-century manor. We had spent that morning in the workshop of a local artist who explained the nuances of colouring which went into the creation of each piece of glass. I was now looking closely to appreciate the unique tones of this particular piece.

When Phineas witnessed an Israelite blatantly transgressing God’s law for holiness, he acted with righteous passion. God said, “He was as zealous for my honor among [the Israelites] as I am” (Numbers 25:11). And God promised, “He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God” (v. 13).

Intellectuals have unique challenges when it comes to raising their children for Jesus. Why is this? I write this from hard-earned experience, both in my own childhood and in my parenting.