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Jesus Trances
When I’m counseling people, I often ask them to close their eyes and imagine Jesus. Once they’ve done so, we ask the Holy Spirit meet with us in that space. Once while doing this, the person I was working with needed to give Jesus a part of their pain, so I asked them to reach…
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Unweirding Myself
“As I listened to you preach I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t this a Methodist Church? This guy’s gonna get himself in trouble!’” a pastoral friend told me after visiting a service where I preached about the Holy Spirit in a rather Pentecostal fashion. I’ve gotten comments similar to this over the years. While I’m certainly…
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The Book Everyone Judged But Never Read
Back in 2011, megachurch Pastor Rob Bell released a book that got him in a lot of trouble with the wider Christian world. It all started with a book trailer where he offered a few provocative thoughts on the traditional view of Hell. Like all book trailers, the point of this one was to say…
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When the Holy Spirit Gets Misinterpreted
I recently had a dream that a construction worker knocked down one of our church walls, claiming that there was poison in it. Another person had a picture come to their mind a few weeks later of our church walls falling over so everyone could see inside. I had been wondering at the time if…
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When People Become Dollar Signs
After many years, an old friend reached out to me out of the blue to see if he could come by my house, see my family and catch up. We arranged some time and about 30 minutes into our conversation, that uncomfortable shift happened: “So the real reason I wanted to catch up was…” Usually…
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The Angel of the Abyss
The first four angelic trumpets fly by pretty quick in Revelation, but things slow down when the fifth trumpet sounds. Suddenly there’s an angel with a key to the Abyss and weird locusts and all kinds of things. Who’s this angel? What are the locusts? In this episode we frame the angel as a bad…
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Death by Sermon
We’ve all had different reactions to our sermons, but my friend’s takes the cake. While he was preaching one Sunday, an older woman gave out a loud groan and died. An ambulance was immediately called as a top notch doctor in the congregation started to check in on her. Unsure of what to do, my…
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When a Person Becomes a Mob
I first learned about harm reduction while serving on the Drug Free Jackson coalition. The premise is pretty simple, though controversial for many: Since drug addiction cannot be solved by saying, “just stop it,” we need to figure out how to reduce the harm that addiction causes while we try to lead addicts toward recovery.…
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That New Space Picture
Everybody’s been sharing that sweet picture of space that was released yesterday. When many realize how big the universe is, one of their next questions is, “Do aliens exist?” I’ll bite! In my book, Alien Theology, I address why Christians shouldn’t have a theological problem with the possibility of aliens (though I don’t necessarily believe…
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An Emergency Exorcism
“Really? You brought Jamin?” the demon laughed as we entered the room, listing off each of our names and messing some of them up. Our small deliverance team had arrived about an hour into the manifestation after getting an emergency call. The room was a mess and would continue to get worse as we watched…
Jamin Bradley 