Work isn’t a necessary evil, and leisure isn’t synonymous with idleness. These are just two of the myths busted in this episode. Mark talks to Worldview Academy executive director Mike Schutt about how thinking rightly about work and leisure help us improve the way we do both. Along the way, they roll their eyes as “work/life balance,” quibble with Aristotle, and explain why leisure sometimes requires a lot of, well, work.

Worldview thinking is a method of examining the underlying assumptions we all make in forming beliefs. In this episode, Mark talks with Worldview Academy co-founder Jeff Baldwin about an unexpected topic: the faith required to be a consistent atheist. We all take some things for granted, even those of us who claim to accept nothing on faith. This conversation will help you see that, and understand how it aids us in speaking with the self-professed “unbelievers” in our lives.

Unexamined assumptions have a powerful effect on your thinking, not because they’re convincing but because cause they are invisible. In this episode, Mark and Cameron discuss three assumptions — the myth of majority rules, the myth of progress, and the myth of nature — that don’t stand up to scrutiny, narratives that need to be challenged if you’re going to think clearly about the world.

THE COMMENTARY is a weekly conversation about vision, worship, and life at Grace Presbyterian Church.

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THE COMMENTARY is a weekly conversation about vision, worship, and life at Grace Presbyterian Church. Since 2019, Mark has led a class line-by-line through the Westminster Confession of Faith. All the recordings are available as A Good Confession. As the end approaches, Cameron asks Mark why he chose to teach the class in the first place, and what his favorite parts of the Confession turned out to be.

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At the beginning of a new sermon series on the Olivet Discourse, Mark suggested that biblical prophecy is a lot like an impressionist painting: it’s designed to be interpreted only from the proper distance. In this episode, Cameron and Mark explore this comparison and ask how it might be helpful for people who want to understand what the Bible says about the “last days” but are intimidated by all the complex theories and enigmatic solutions that often accompany the topic.

“All men are mortal,” or so the syllogism goes. But that’s easy to forget in the modern world, where the realities of suffering and death are concealed behind euphemisms and often hidden from sight. As Christians we acknowledge that death is inevitable — “it is appointed unto man once to die” — but also that death is a consequence of sin, the last enemy Christ will overcome. How do we live faithfully with the reality of death? That’s the question Mark and Cameron explore in this episode.

Is it a lecture? Is it a TED talk? Is it an entertaining bit of folksy wisdom? People have all sorts of ideas about what a sermon is, and what it’s for — most of them quite wrong! In this episode, Cameron and Mark talk about the sermon as an act of worship, one of the ordinary means of grace. What does this signify, and how does it influence the way a sermon is prepared, delivered, and heard? Let’s find out.

Your commenters are back! When people visit Grace, one of the unique features they often comment on is the Order of Worship, a multi-page printed booklet that contains our liturgy for the service, including music, prayers, texts, and all the usual announcements you’d expect to find in a church bulletin. In the first episode of 2024, Mark and Cameron explain why we produce these booklets every week rather than using screens or hymnals, and how you can use them to enhance your worship.

For the final episode of 2023, something a little more light-hearted than usual: Cameron and Mark review their personal bests (and in some cases, worsts) of the year through the lens of the five senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Prepare to enter a little too deeply into the minds of our hosts — and enjoy a year-end roundup to tide you over until we return in January.