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.

All Articles

God's doing for us that gets done is Word and Sacrament stuff. Everything else flows from His speaking to us, baptizing us, bodying and bloodying us. Jesus sees our need.
The Christian Church is one of the last refuges in modern American society where people who have perpetrated or suffered trauma and violence can gather together to receive the truth about themselves.
If it's not Christ Jesus "for you" they're not delivering the Gospel to you.
As long as we hold tight to a life that was never ours to possess in the first place, so long as we refuse to lay down our life so others can live, Jesus can't do a thing for us.
Heaven is not our ultimate hope. Our promise is not to live forever riding on rainbows and soaring in the clouds.
If we are saved by faith, if it is by faith that we have life in His name, what do the sacraments have to do with it? The answer is: everything.
Even in our principled disagreements, we continue to pray for the unity of all, and invite the world to taste and see that the Lord is good.
He was providentially injecting streams of light into the darkness, that thereby he might lead them toward the true light of Christ.
Put to death by God's Word of Law, we are then raised to new life by God's Word of Gospel.
This is the night from when all those nights receive their light. For this is the night when Christ, the Life arose from the dead.
The story of Christ crucified has a happy ending. Jesus has conquered the grave. He beat the death rap.
Jesus is many things. He’s an example. He’s a teacher. He’s a great thinker and philosopher. But He’s also so much more, and He’s one thing above all else: He is Jesus, Savior.