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...
The Kingdom is served in greater ways when Christians and churches are collaborating and cooperating to proclaim the Gospel and minister to human need… The call and challenge for each individual, each church, and for all of us as a Fellowship, is to be the presence of...
Until you become thankful, you will never find joy. Being thankful is not telling God you appreciate the fact that your life is not in shambles. If that is the basis of your gratitude you are on slippery ground. Every day of your life you face the possibility that a...
If the church is to flourish, we cannot build our religious lives around a gospel of fear, or a gospel of reward for our meanness. The Christian faith is not about being afraid of God. Fear may get us to submit but fear always leads to anger and resentment and...
Grace is Christianity’s best gift to the world, a spiritual nova in our midst exerting a force stronger than vengeance, stronger than racism, stronger than hate. Sadly, to a world desperate for this grace the church sometimes presents one more form of ungrace. Too...