I think Jesus would have said, "It's not about me." During his lifetime, he deflected attention from himself. In an illuminating passage in our earliest gospel, when a man addressed him as "Good Teacher," Jesus responded with, "Why do you call me good? No one is good...
My favorite lines about Christ's "Second Coming" are in the story "A Christmas Memory," by Truman Capote. In this autobiographical piece of great delicacy, the author describes his last Christmas with the woman who brought him up. The author is seven at the time; she...
The Church does not determine what the Bible teaches; it is the Bible that determines what the Church must teach.
The inherent legalism of the Western Church trains our eyes on Jesus' suffering as the judgment of God upon our sin & virtually blinds us to the more obvious point that Jesus suffered from the wickedness of humanity. It was the human race, not the Father, who...
The church is church only when it is there for others...not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell people in every calling what a life with Christ is, what it means "to be there for others." from Letters and Papers from Prison
The alligator--the chaos, the storm, the danger, the divorce, the illness, the crisis--and the human response--what you and I do in the midst of chaos--and the presence of God in chaos--these are profound issues of faith. And the stories about chaos and God and us are...
It would be hard to deny that contemporary British (and most Western) Christianity is in an advanced state of syncretism. The church has lived so long as a permitted and even privileged minority, accepting regulation to the private sphere in a culture whose public...
John's testimonials are lacking in content and repetitious: "Look! The Lamb of God!" Yet on the basis of his witness two of his followers become Jesus' first disciples. Having seen, John testifies so that others might see... As Karl Barth said, anybody who stops on...
Christians have spent enormous energy over the years debating and decreeing truth; every church defends its particular version. But what about grace? How rare to find a church competing to "out-grace" its rivals. Grace is Christianity's best gift to the world, a...
Doing the Gospel rather than just quoting it was the best way I could find out what God was up to. I didn't believe in dragging souls into some special club of the saved... My only sense of "mission" now was to show others that they, too, could feed and touch and heal...