Congregations that discern the mission of God in the world and discover their participation in it will shape the future of the Church in North America. Missional churches are ones that see their purpose for existence as incarnating the life and ministry of Jesus...
Under the sway of forces hostile to God, the world seeks to twist the church into its own mold. Under the sovereign rule of God, on the other hand, the church must resist conformity to the world. It must not capitulate to the pressures to fall in line (Romans 12:20)....
Look, the church has made mistakes. The church is full of many of us who are victims, who have been bruised, lied to. And yet don’t give up on God because God has been badly represented by people. from Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where Yancey spoke about his latest...
A church must not overlook the fact that it exists for unselfish, active service to society, to individuals and groups and even to its opponents. If it does so, it loses its dignity, its claim and the reason for its existence, since it abandons discipleship. But if a...
When she was about seven, her best friend got lost one day. The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the...
In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other...
If the people are not themselves seeking to determine the Word of God in the tangle of their individual and shared lives, how can they discern the accuracy and adequacy of the theologian’s interpretation of that Word for the group? The church as a group, as a...
The weeks of November and early December are often experienced as a peculiarly flat time. The reds and golds of autumn have faded into brown, and the sky…has gone gray. The days grow shorter and colder, but still winter has not quite come. It is a time of waiting. It...
The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do. What if the gravel of a parking lot looks as promising to God as the floorboards of a...
Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine...