This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.
On its journey from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul, this special place helps us understand the broader arc of Christian history, which goes on until Christ's return.
We needn’t fear statistics and studies as palm readings into a certain future. God is God, and his Spirit is alive through his Word.

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Repentance is not limited to a season.
Christians don’t need a bucket list. We’ve got the whole bucket: the Word fulfilled, life fulfilled, and life in full.
We now are the magi: we worship Christ because of who he is, but also because of what he has done for us and what he continues to do in his gift-giving to us.
The “Chalking of the Door” is a way to celebrate and literally mark the occasion of the Epiphany and God’s blessing of our lives and home.
Thanksgiving is never out of place for the Christian.
Below is the Thinking Fellows Essential Reading List with contributions from each of the Thinking Fellows hosts.
Symbols throw together a physical artifact we can see, hear, touch, taste, and/or smell, with a truth beyond the tangible.
This is an edited excerpt from Addendum A, “The Church Year,” On Any Given Sunday: The Story of Christ in the Divine Service, written by Michael Berg (1517 Publishing, 2023), pgs. 113-120.
To embrace our creatureliness is to affirm the truth that we were created to worship.
God does not give us an undebatable answer to suffering. Instead, God suffers, too.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Your God is Too Glorious: Finding God in the Most Unexpected Places by Chad Bird (1517 Publishing, 2023).
You are the baptized, for in Christ we are all wet. The demographic dividers are washed away.