THE BULLETIN OF IBTM
with Douglas Jacoby

For the audiovisual version of the bulletin (YouTube, about 3 minutes, read by Chase Mackintosh), click here. 

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L: The afternoon sun over Morecambe Bay, North West England
R: We took a 4-mi walk along the old Lancaster Canal


4 June 2025

Good morning from Lancashire! We trust you are well.

Today’s offerings center on church: an interview with Jon Sherwood, who asked me to weigh in on “Why the Future May Be Smaller, Slower, & More Spiritual,” and an excellent and intriguing article by ACU’s Kent Smith.

Unpolished: Why the Future [of Church] May Be Smaller, Slower & More Spiritual

Jon Sherwood’s stimulating podcast is Unpolished: Fueling Faith in the 21st Century. He interviewed me a few weeks ago on “Why the Future May Be Smaller, Slower, and More Spiritual.”

To hear the recent podcast, please CLICK HERE.

It Doesn't Look Like Church to Me!
Kent Smith (Abilene Christian University)

Kent Smith is a fascinating Christian I had the pleasure to meet earlier this year. Kent is especially qualified to speak about the relational aspects of house churches, as well as a researcher with hard data supporting the fact that on any given Sunday only 15% of Americans are in church—not 42%, as widely (mis)reported.

Wherever we turn these days, it seems that we hear about new forms of church: emerging churches, missional churches, house churches, organic churches, new monastics. Often they are small in number, with practices and language unfamiliar to us, and some Christians find it hard to even recognize these communities as church. KEEP READING

More Quotable Guinness

During May and June this bulletin features thought-provoking quotations from Os Guiness. In 2022, after my first reading of Renaissance: the Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times, I posted comments and select quotes HERE. After the second reading—and this is a book worth reading twice—there are even more quotations I’d like to share.

“… The West owes a vast debt to the Greeks, the Romans and the Jews. Among the gifts we owe to the first are our philosophy, our science, our political understanding, our drama and our sculpture. Among the gifts we owe to the second are our understanding of the art of power, government, law, order, and the importance of such communications as roads and such conveniences as warm baths and central heating…. And among the gifts we owe to the third are our belief in human dignity and freedom, our sense of history and human agency, our high valuation of ethics and responsibility, and the strength of our millennia-long commitment to heterosexual marriage and the primacy of family as the bedrock of society.

Yet true though this acknowledgment is, a moment’s thought would remind us that all three of these civilizations were Mediterranean, whereas the West is far more than Mediterranean. It is European, American, Canadian, Australian and now far beyond. The point is that for all the gifts of the preceding civilizations, what made the West the West was Christian faith… It is the plain fact of history that both the famous Roman sword and the fearsome barbarian axe and club were laid at the feet of the unarmed Prince of Peace whose followers were the real creators of the West” (66-67).

“What if Jesus had never been born?… More specifically, what are the distinctive features of the West that are the direct gifts of the Christian faith? (1) The West has a strong tradition of philanthropy that has created a culture of giving and caring that is unmatched in any other civilization in history. (2) The West has a blood-red tradition of recurring reform movements that has no parallel in other civilizations. (3) The West is the source of the universities that today represent one of the most powerful institutions of the modern world. (4) The West is the fountainhead of modern science, which along with capitalism and technology is revolutionizing the global world. (5) The West is the pioneer and champion of human dignity and the entire human rights revolution—all of which owes its origin to the Jewish and Christian understanding of men and women made in the image of God” (69-70).

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Until next week…

On Friday I head to İzmir for the Global Smyrna Meeting (focused on the Seven Churches of Revelation). The ministry is hosting a number of African teachers. After that, there’s another conference on the 1700th Anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. We will spend most of our time in Istanbul and İznik (Nicaea). Both conferences are hosted by Tutku Educational Travel.

I am thrilled to be delivering the opening message at the Global Smyrna Meeting as well as the closing talk in the Nicaea conference. Afterwards, we will enjoy a few days of fellowship with a number of professors and spouses.

Next week’s bulletin will be written from İzmir. Thanks for your prayers while we are are in Turkey (now Türkiye).
DJ

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