Facebook Research and Setting Our Minds on Things Above

Late last year, Facebook received criticism for conducting research on Facebook users without their knowledge. Though the methods are definitely questionable, the results are fascinating. Kashmir Hill of Forbes magazine wrote: Facebook’s data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to […]

Are Christians Worse Than Others at Relationships?

In the later part of 2014, LifeWay Research conducted a poll of an ethnically and religiously diverse sampling of Americans. The research gauged each participant’s perspective on his or her relationships through a series of questions. The responses from Evangelical Christians polled during the survey were surprising. Evangelicals were 14-21% more likely to strongly agree […]

Harvard Research on Life Change

Modern research studies often demonstrate principles that Christians know to be true—truths about life and humanity already disclosed by God in Scripture. This should not be surprising to us because whether the researcher is a believer or not, research studies typically examine an aspect of God’s general revelation, in this case, humanity. For example, one […]

Transformational Discipleship: The Research Behind the Book

Earlier this year, Philip Nation, Michael Kelley, and I coauthored Transformational Discipleship. Based on the research behind the book, we discovered that transformation is most likely to occur in the life of a believer when the person has truth applied to his heart by godly leaders while in a teachable posture. We called this the “transformational sweet spot.” The transformational sweet […]

Some Amazing Research About Giving

The sample of the research I am about to share is very small. So small that this would definitely not be considered an appropriate enough research sample to make wide, sweeping claims. But the observation really got my attention; I place it in the amazing category. When I served as executive pastor, I was plugged […]