Mike Wittmer

What I think. What I know. What I think I know.

  • so funny and true, I call it “funue”

    Matt Westerholm mentioned this to me, and Jonathan Shelley just sent me the link.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you may skip church this Sunday.  Watch this if you enjoy satire aimed at us.

  • fathers

    I’ve spent the last three and a half days at the Acton Institute’s “Acton University” meetings here in GR.  The lectures were provocative and stimulating and convinced me that our economy and society are pretty much sunk.  I’ll say more about that later after I process it all, but since Father’s Day is coming up, I…

  • summertime

    Maybe it’s my Mennonite roots, but I had a vegetable garden long before I knew that it made me a 21st century saint.  I have always eaten local and nearly organic, except for the Miracle Gro I use on my pepper plants to help them compete with their southern cousins.  This year I planted 70 tomato plants, hoping that…

  • presuppositional follow-up

    My new friend got back to me a few days later.  He said that his presupposition was that he knew very little and was likely wrong about many things.  And he suggested that my view was immoral for not caring enough to offer proof for itself when heaven and hell were at stake.  I think…

  • presuppositional apologetics

    About a month ago I received a spirited email from a self-described skeptic whose friend had recommended that he read Don’t Stop Believing.  The reader said that he had been raised in a conservative Christian home, but now he thought that there was insufficient proof for the existence of God and Scripture.  He was singularly…

  • God is dead

    We did it!  Here are the opening paragraphs from an article in USA Today today: Who says Cleveland can’t win a championship? The long-suffering sports city — which can’t seem to win a trophy on a court or a field — captured one in a hotel ballroom Friday night when 14-year-old Anamika Veeramani took first prize at…

  • so open it’s shut

    I’ve been too busy with summer school, retaining walls, computer crashes, and toilet back-ups to post anything this week, but this morning I found enough space to revise my devotional on “The New Pharisees.”  I’m glad for your feedback, because I realized that the discussion about whether or not some emergents meet the criteria of…

  • baptism

    One of the ironies of being a Baptist is that my tradition puts much less weight on baptism than most others.  As my friend Dave Lamb said recently, we spend so much time saying what the sacraments/ordinances aren’t that we end up with very little when we’re done.  Dave had a word for that, which…

  • the new pharisees

    I don’t know if this is the best topic for an ODJ devotional, but it struck me recently that many emergent leaders inadvertently shut the door to the kingdom, which is precisely the problem that Jesus had with the Pharisees.  I’m not sure if my logic holds in the third to last paragraph, but I’m…

  • friends who do things

    I have two über pastor friends who are doing or have done things that I wanted to tell you about. 1. Chris Brauns, the author of the best book on forgiveness, is leading a webinar tomorrow from 11:00-12:00 AM EST at the 2010 Peacemakers conference.  Space is limited, but if you are able to participate…