It is better to stop worrying about the results of our evangelizing and instead worry about whether we have truly made the gospel known in our relationships with others.
Deep and authentic faith is meaningful; but can be costly, challenging, even frightening.
What is the better place? As seen in the last post, the three most popular sketches of the Christian “better place”—heaven-centered, human-centered, and world-centered—have been various soteriological attempts to depict both our hope and mission. (Soteriology, as you may remember, refers in theology to the theology of salvation.) However, as John C. Nugent argues in his book Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World
If you reflect on your spiritual walk, how do Peter’s various responses to Jesus resonate with your experience?
There are some things that I know I should believe with my head, but I struggle because I don’t experience them in my heart.
Go to the Limits of Your Longing -Rainer Maria Rilke God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows
Yet, for our faith to be real, for it to be authentic, we must risk moving out of the shadows. So the question is, how close to the fire will we get?
Have you ever felt really badly about something you’ve done wrong? Have you ever in some way harmed another person or harmed your walk with God? Have you ever done something that you just know you should not have done, and then you realize it. And wow. You feel terrible. You just feel awful. You want to make it right.
They were baptized, they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, they were discipled, and they shared meals and fellowship.
Airborne illness. War. Overpopulation. Mass chaos. Environmental disaster. Oppressive dictators. All of these – and more – are cataclysmic triggers for a dystopian society. If you’re catching up with American publishing, television, and film, the genre of “dystopia” has flooded the entertainment industry. For many, it’s becoming a little repetitive and mundane; but like it or not, people are fascinated,
Churches have personalities, expressed through their organization, Christian education
processes, preaching, and worship. Each can have strengths and challenges, but the diversity is reflective of the differences we see in people, including the
Apostles.
Instead of focusing on which
organizational structure or form of worship we prefer, we need to ask if our church is manifesting Christ
I have often thought when hearing of another nose-dive from ministry, “not him?” but underlying that has been a naive attitude that has assumed that it won’t ever be me.
Christmas is almost here! Thinking backing over the last few weeks, when have you felt the most peaceful? When have you felt the most stress or anxiety? As you think ahead to the coming week, what are you looking forward to? What, if anything, are you dreading? Offer those things into God’s care.
Yesterday was the third Sunday of Advent, called Gaudete Sunday; “gaudete” is Latin for “rejoice.” Even a cursory reading of the Bible reveals that joy and rejoicing are an inevitable overflow in the lives of people who have understood and experienced God at work in their lives.
As good as the story of Esther is, however, it presents us with a problem: God is absent. Unlike other Old Testament stories, where we read of God appearing to Abraham or working behind the scenes to foil the plans of the Pharaoh, the story of Esther never mentions God. Rather, the characters in Esther appear to be acting on
We live in a culture that wants to move faster and faster still. But, is faster always better? There are some things about going slow that you cannot get when you are moving fast. When I was serving as a youth minister, I took the youth group hiking to the top of a small mountain. At the end of the
At a time in my life when things were not like I wanted, I sat in a restaurant booth across from a friend as tears streamed down my face explaining how everything was going wrong. The holidays were around the corner. I was short on cash. I was helping other people but no one asked me if I needed help.
I’m a historian by training. It is what I do and how I think. This training orients my own spiritual formation as well. I think about the past as a way to make sense of God’s faithfulness and to consider my Christian duty as well as others’. Thinking like a historian tends to consider how we narrate our stories and
Many families enjoy re-telling the events that happened around the time that someone was born – the mad dash to the hospital, nervous pacing in the waiting room, funny names that your parents almost gave you. Luke begins his gospel by telling the story surrounding Jesus’ birth. Did you know that Jesus was born next to animals? That’s unusual isn’t
Christmas is around the corner, and for the Christian church this is the beginning of the Advent season. Advent is a season when we are reminded that God is with us. In fact, one of the names for God that we hear often during Christmastime is Emmanuel, which means: God with us. (Isaiah 7:14) However, many times we don’t feel
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