About

This project was born a little more than 20 years ago when I first came across a question I couldn't answer.

I grew up in church, and I had a good memory for what I read and heard, so I've always had a pretty good base knowledge of those Bible passages you usually hear about in church. In college, however, you tend to meet people from different backgrounds and different perspectives, and I came upon people who raised questions I'd never heard of or brought up ideas I was pretty sure were wrong but couldn't articulate why. And so I began to read. I read pretty far and wide, randomly picking up books that "sounded good" before I finally learned to pick out better authors and to focus on more important topics.

Over the years I've made some surprising discoveries. Among them:

• "Belief" that doesn't change your behavior is not biblical faith.
• Knowing more about God can strengthen your faith in and your love for God.
• Knowing why we believe what we believe is important.
• There are lots of issues dividing Christians that are relatively minor.
• There are a few issues that are very, very important and worth dividing over.
• Loving God requires loving people.
• Christians can be very stupid, but when we do it right, the Church can be the most amazing thing in the world.

And then I had kids. And I realized that I can either leave them to flounder and figure stuff out like I did, burning 20+ years that could have been more productive, or sum all of this up in a digestible fashion and give them a head start. I chose option 2. And because I'm a better writer than I am a talker, this is the form I decided to give it.