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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Like her Lord, the Church has dirt under her nails, the smell of coffin wood on her clothes, and a hunger in her belly.
Don’t let anyone tell you the academy denies the concept of truth...good gracious, I hope by the end of the semester they are still alive.
In the twinkling of that eye the perishable will become imperishable, and our bodies will be changed and become more glorious than we ever could have imagined.
Then He went to the coffin. He touched it, like a carpenter sizing up the piece of wood He plans to turn into some sort of new creation, running His hand down its side.
But one key theme that kept surfacing again and again was love: Jesus loved people, the Church showed me genuine love, and above all, God’s love in Christianity is unconditional.
It is the strangest of morgues—people arrive dead as doornails and leave alive.
So it is with my little garden as well; dead, so it would seem. Nothing. Barren.
Every Christian is abundantly rich through baptism.
Over and over, generation after generation, sinners repeat the same mistake. "How is it possible that God can be a man," we ask.
Professional historians frequently assert that "miracles" are not a proper subject for historical investigation.
The essential Christian claim is that God came to earth in Christ and died for men to take care of their problem of sin and evil.
So, what do we do when someone doesn't believe God's promise of forgiveness, life, and eternal salvation is for him?