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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And your life, weary and broken as it is, is hidden by God in Christ—tucked away in God’s enduring and eternally given Word, in Jesus.
At times, evangelical Christianity can be a paradox. For as much as Protestants have spurned Roman Catholicism, they’re much more Catholic than they’d ever like to admit.
There is a difference between preaching about Christ and preaching Christ.
Many Christians are worried—perhaps legitimately—that the state is a short step away from turning the Law of God into hate speech and silencing the legal preaching of God’s Word.
That’s where a true encounter with God leaves you. Unable to point the finger at anyone else, all you can do is fall on your face, confess your sin, be absolved, and join the angels in singing, “Holy, holy, holy.”
Few smells are as pervasive as the smell of smoke. Anyone who’s sat around a campfire can attest.
Mordor’s bleak existence and the successful salvific mission of Frodo and Samwise is what makes Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings such a psychologically enjoyable epic.
The Church of Jesus Christ is and stays Jesus' Church whether we decide it is or not.
The miracle of Pentecost is not obvious; it is the miracle of faith created through the preaching of the word of the cross.
For most of my Christian experience I was taught and I taught others that church was primarily a place to go to serve, to use your gifts, to bless others.
Jesus is the end of religion.
God only baptizes babies. He only saves babies. He only resurrects babies.