My answer to a friend: There is no success in ministry, only service and moments of celebration. If you choose to minister, expect to be misunderstood. All of the pain people carry will fall upon your brow, and you shall be the stand-in for every ignorant statement...
Church members get more upset over sound, temp, and music styles than empty prayer rooms, altars, and baptistries.
The story of Christianity didn't take shape behind pulpits or on altars or in books. No, the story of Christianity takes shape around tables, as people face one another as equals, telling stories, sharing memories, enjoying food with one another. from Table to Table
We have bowed too low for too long at the personal altar of individualism. We need one another. We need the church, the family of faith.
The experiment with faith is the work of a lifetime, a continual openness to change, a permanent quest. What I learned serving at the altar was not which Eucharistic theology was "right." What I learned, and must always be learning and relearning, is who Jesus is, and...
We must become relevant and reverent. Worship must become the meeting place between the eternal and the contemporary. We tend to love the altar so much that we refuse to set it on fire. Yet God comes in the flames. Our God is a consuming fire. Each generation must...
God calls for worship that involves our whole being. The body, mind, spirit, and emotions should all be laid on the altar of worship. Often we have forgotten that worship should include the body as well as the mind and spirit.
In Genesis 22 God tells Abraham to journey to the mountain of Moriah and there build an altar to worship [God]. But this is no ordinary worship time. God instructs Abraham to take his son Isaac, for he is to be the offering. And though God never intends to let Abraham...
Just as worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. If worship does not propel us into greater obedience, it has not been worship. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change. Resentments cannot be held with the same tenacity when we enter...
So, the question is not, “Will we sacrifice our children?” The question is, “To which god, upon which altar will we sacrifice our children?” We are all busy sacrificing our children to some god, laying their lives upon some altar. So the question is not if we shall be...