It is not the task of the church to "Make America Great Again." The contemporary task of the church is to make Christianity countercultural again. And once we untether Jesus from the interests of empire, we begin to see just how countercultural and radical Jesus'...
The Church is not to be found at the "center" of a left/right political world. The Church is to be a species of its own kind, confounding left, right, and center, and finding its identity from the "center" of God's life in Christ.
Do you know what? If we could get our churches to see that we are to love without discrimination and that we are to give the Holy Spirit liberty to love everybody in sight through us, then we would have revival on our hands! The world would turn aside to see the...
Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America. They strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Could anything be more true of our churches? They would be shocked at the proposition of...
The Church is God saying, "I'm throwing a banquet, and all the mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine."
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...
The church is coming apart at the seams right before our eyes...Stop duct-taping the past and listen! A sower went out to sow.
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?
There is no sense of absence where there has been no sense of presence. What makes absence hurt, what makes it ache, is the memory of what used to be there but is no longer. Absence is the arm flung across the bed in the middle of the night, the empty space where a...
Why do Christians sing when they are together? The reason is, quite simply, because in singing together it is possible for them to speak and pray the same Word at the same time; in other words, because here they can unite in the Word. There should be singing, not only...