A strange sensation overcame me earlier this month. My family visited the lot where we always pick out a Christmas tree. While my wife found a tree she thought would fit, the kids and I ran around and in between the trees. They walked away with candy canes while men tied the tree to the top of the car.
When we neared home, an unexpected feeling washed over me. Didn’t we just get back from getting a Christmas tree? How can it already be Advent again?
In that moment I realized how I’ve coped with the COVID-19 pandemic. At some level my brain shut down with just about everything else on March 13. Without travel or conferences or vacations to mark the passing of time, I still feel like it’s the beginning of spring, even as the weather reminds me it’s just about Christmas.
You know what they often say to parents of young children: the days are long, but the years are short. That’s been my experience of COVID-19—long days of never-ending adjustments, but a year suspended in time before the shutdown. But it may not be your experience, especially if you work in healthcare or you’ve lost someone in the pandemic. We’re supposed to be in this together. Unfortunately, COVID-19 driven us apart, not just physically, but also in what we’ve experienced and how we even assess and process the ongoing threat.
This year’s picks for Editor’s Choice indicate the effects of COVID-19 around the world. For two months or so, online readers wanted nothing but information related to COVID-19—how to start church livestreams, how to talk to children, how to work efficiently from home, and so on.
But even in a global pandemic, time marches on, even if we don’t realize it. Life doesn’t give us a do-over. God’s purposes cannot be thwarted. His goodness cannot be diminished. So in this year’s list of my favorite TGC resources you’ll also see evidence of God’s faithfulness to deliver on every promise, his undaunted commitment to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth.
World in His Hands
Thank you for reading, watching, and listening in 2020. We take this stewardship seriously, especially in our desire to offer hope for the searching. We expect to close the year for TGC.org around 100 million pageviews, an increase of 7 percent over 2019, along with a 15 percent year-over-year increase in time spent on page. But this year we prioritized video and audio. Watchtime increased 22 percent across Facebook and YouTube, totaling 33.8 million minutes, and YouTube subscribers increased 41 percent to more than 105,000. Podcasts grew even more. Downloads more than doubled from nearly 4.2 million in 2019 to 10.5 million in 2020 with the addition of TGC Q+A, Gospelbound, Let’s Talk, and As In Heaven to our TGC Podcast Network.
We’d love to count on your support for 2021, especially as we plan to host two national events simultaneously online and in person. We’re also expanding our book publishing to equip church leaders to reach the next generation with the unchanging gospel for an ever-changing world. The search bar is a spiritual battleground, and we need your help to shine the light of the gospel in the darkness.
Who knows what 2021 will hold for any of us. But we know—and trust—the One who holds the whole world in his sure hands.
How the Pandemic Opens Doors for Evangelism
By Sam Chan
We know how many doors have been shut by COVID-19. But Sam Chan invites us to consider the spiritual openings afforded by the pandemic and how we can bring hope and consolation to a weary world.
Is the Church a Victim of Success? The WEIRD Truth
Review by Andrew Wilson
You’ll find a feast of thought in this dual review of books about centuries-long trends shaping the church. Wilson makes sense of seemingly contradictory analysis about fertility and faith as he calls the church to love its prodigal culture.
Let’s Talk: Battling Discontentment
By Jasmine Holmes, Melissa Kruger, and Jackie Hill Perry
This year gave us ample causes for discontentment. Which means it also gave us ample opportunities to turn toward a God who only gives his children what is good. It’s encouraging to hear friends work through disappointment together in faith.
Your Neighbor’s New Creed: ‘In This House, We Believe . . .’
By Brett McCracken
You’ve probably seen these signs in your neighbors’ yards. McCracken points out the contradictors as he invites us to view the signs as an invitation to discussion, even evangelism. Look for Rebecca McLaughlin’s new book on this topic, The Secular Creed: Engaging 5 Contemporary Claims, in April 2021.
How Things Have Changed: Reflections of a Millennial Pastor in a Gen Z World
By Chris Colquitt
The church has talked so much about millennials that you may not realize they’re not young any longer. And their younger siblings in Gen Z differ in significant ways that demand different emphases in our teaching and preaching.
Paul Tripp on Leadership Who Won’t Flame Out
Interview by Collin Hansen with Paul Tripp
Some interviews you just know will change lives, because you can sense them changing yours. That was the case in this episode of Gospelbound as Paul Tripp called churches to tend cultures that will resist domineering, abusive leadership.
Who Really Killed Emmanuel and Juliana Bileya
By Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
This pastor who studied at Calvin Seminary seemed to be a victim of same anti-Christian violence that has plagued Nigeria for years. But the actual story, uncovered by Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra as she talked with this couple’s friends and neighbors, is even more disturbing.
Nietzsche Was Right
Review by Tim Keller
When Tim Keller says it’s hard to overstate the importance of a book, you’d be wise to read it. If we’re going to reach the West again, we’ll need to help the West see its debt to Christianity. Nobody does a better job than Tom Holland of showing the Christian origins of justice, equality, and freedom.
George Floyd and Me
By Shai Linne
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, not many articles succeeded in building empathy and understanding across ethnic and political divides. But Shai Linne accomplished that feat in this moving account of the black experience in America.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of TGC’s New President
By Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
Imagine replacing the world-renowned founder of a growing ministry. Now imagine doing so in 2020. That’s been the experience of Julius Kim. But God has prepared him over a lifetime of learning to translate and adapt across cultural change, as a pilgrim in this world.
‘The Crown’ Episode That Finds Faith in a Secular Age
By Brett McCracken
Maybe you think TV is a vast wasteland. Or maybe you think streaming services have ushered in Peak TV, a golden age of prestige shows like The Crown. Either way you can appreciate how this episode wrestles with the loss of faith in the 20th-century West. And maybe we can even discern a way forward for the church.
7 Reasons I Appreciate My (Non-Reformed) Childhood Church
By Jeff Robinson
The way we sometimes speak of churches we’ve left, especially during disagreement, makes it seem like God could not have been sovereign over that place and time. Jeff Robinson models a more mature approach by highlighting the good without minimizing the bad in the church that reared him.
Don’t Miss the Mountains
By Moses Y. Lee
Who doesn’t love a trip to the mountains? Who isn’t moved by such visions of grandeur? So we shouldn’t be surprised by the important role played by mountains in God’s unfolding plan of redemption.
How Sex Became King
By Alex Duke
Anyone raising and leading the next generation needs a clear understanding of their views toward sex. Unless you develop a sense for why it’s challenging for youth to comprehend, let alone obey God’s Word, you’ll likely fail in helping them find the beauty and truth in God’s design.
The Folly of ‘Looking for Community’
By Eugene Park
If you’re in leadership, you hear all the time from people visiting your church that they’re looking for community. But you don’t so much find community as you build it, wherever you are. The same consumeristic mindset that leads us on this search undermines our ability to ever discover what we want.
We Need Prophets, Not Partisans
By Brett McCracken
Partisans see only evil in their opponents, and only good in their allies. But the biblical prophets saw God at work even through his enemies, and they condemned the evil perpetuated by God’s covenant people. Partisanship today is the route to worldly acclaim and political success. But as Brett McCracken observes, the church has been called as prophets to seek righteousness for all, starting in the household of faith.
Riots in John Piper’s Neighborhood
By Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
George Floyd’s death upended life in Minneapolis and even in many other cities as violent protests spread. But John Piper will keep plodding along in his urban Minneapolis neighborhood, just as he has for decades. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra captures the reassuring calm of Piper that comes from trusting God and eschewing attention.
Suffering, Healing, and the Hope of Eternity
By Joni Eareckson Tada and Nancy Guthrie
It’s a beautiful thing when you can watch two longtime friends, who have both suffered much, praise God together in song. How else can we respond when we truly behold the beauty and bounty of God’s love for us? “We have so many good reasons to rejoice,” Tada says, as she looks forward to heaven.
How Romans 8 Made Me a Calvinist
By Justin Dillehay
It’s the favorite chapter of Scripture for many. Justin Dillehay explains the “golden chain of redemption” and God’s unbreakable promises to his beloved: “God is in charge. The outcome is secure.” Comforting words for 2020.
Church, Don’t Let Coronavirus Divide You
By Brett McCracken
Maybe this hope for unity and trust amid COVID-19 was futile. But why should disagreement about science that few of us understand, and temporary disruptions that most of us can manage, cause the bonds of faith to break? It must be because the bonds in many churches were never built by faith in the first place but by some other worldly, disposable standard.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
By Carl Trueman
This article previews and summarizes much of what would appear in Trueman’s widely acclaimed book of the same title. Don’t get so caught up in the trees of daily headlines that you miss the forest of cultural change. Generally speaking, the day-to-day news stories that consume so much attention don’t make much difference in the end. But the ideas that have emerged and merged together over the centuries, identified here by Trueman, shape the very ways we conceive and perceive our everyday world.
Why Hollywood Praises Elliot Page (and Blacklists Me)
by Becket Cook
Are we really praising someone’s authenticity when we ostracize anyone who makes a different decision? Why do we only celebrate a celebrity’s transgender identity and not value the authentic pursuit of Christian discipleship? Becket Cook cuts to the heart to how tolerance became so intolerant.
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