... whether they come from the Muslim world, or the Buddhist world, or the Christian world or the non-believing world, they are members of the Body of Christ because they’ve been called by God. They may not even know the name of Jesus but they know in their hearts...
Language matters. That’s why if I hear that word “volunteer” one more time in a church setting, I’m going to officially nominate the word for the “Annoying Word of the Year” award. The church is the work of the Holy Spirit bringing Christ to life, not through...
We can't be the Church if we choose to overlook some members of the Body of Christ. If we define who we are by who we are leaving out, it begs the question: Have we ever let Christ in?
I suspect that Western individualism has done more than any other single factor to anesthetize and even euthanize the power of the Gospel. Salvation, heaven, hell, worthiness, grace, and eternal life all came to be read through the lens of separate ego, crowding God's...
When you hear someone "making room" for bigotry embedded in state law or church polity, look at who they are. If they are not one of the people oppressed by that policy, but they're making room for it, they are complicit in the oppression, not at all a neutral...
It is mysterious, but somehow, when everything else is stripped away, we find ourselves sitting [at Christ's table] in the abundance that remains. We encounter sustenance for the journey, companions for the road ahead, and the body and blood of Christ, which invites...
As the father of two girls (now also grandfather of three), I have cringed listening to some preachers and teachers in the church make perfectly good points while using solely male pronouns during their exposition... There are, indeed, “hidden figures” in our...
The stories of the Resurrection, as hard as they are for modern ears to comprehend, mean that the life Jesus lived and the project he pursued (the Kingdom of God) did not perish at the crucifixion, but continued in the lives of those who carried on what he had begun....
Some people want to belong without belonging. They are the ones whose obituaries read, "Dorothy was a lifelong member of St. John's Church"--except that no one at St. John's can ever remember meeting her, although ninety-three-year-old Mrs. Smith thinks that maybe...
The feeling of communion was already so intense that I did not go forward for the bread and wine. I let the body go forward for me, while I sat there in God's pleasure. Before Christ Church, I thought that worship was something people cooked up by themselves. At...