“The church is anti-intellectual.” If you’re a church leader—and especially if you’re an evangelical—you’ve probably heard that claim a thousand times before. (Heck, we’ve even made it.) But while the prophetic shadow of Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind may still loom large over the landscape of American Christianity, a growing number of bright lights are giving an increasingly thoughtful church reason to hope. One of those lights is Matthew Lee Anderson. You probably know Anderson as the founder and erstwhile regular contributor to the blog Mere Orthodoxy, where he’s written lengthy essays on everything from Trump’s implications for evangelicals to sexual ethics to why “deep reading” is vital for a robust faith. His most recent book, The End of Our Exploring (Moody, 2013), argues for the importance of question-asking to the Christian faith, urging a dogged pursuit of intellectual integrity that, as he says in this week’s episode of The Calling, has implications for local church ministry. What does that kind of top-shelf ministry actually look like? Find out by joining CT managing editor Richard Clark as he chats with Anderson about teaching Sunday school, evangelicalism’s bad rap, and why we reason about what we love.
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