The raceless gospel proclaims an anti-oppressive ecclesiology and embodies a spirituality of somebodiness that calls out the heresy of white supremacy while calling all God's children into beloved community.
Our world is intended to reflect God's vision of Shalom, the beloved community, the peaceable realm, in which joy and laughter, love and harmony guide the affairs of persons and nations.
The moment we believe we are superior to another, possess a special knowledge of God that others cannot without us, or insist that a life outside of our beliefs and community is futile, we are not evangelizing, we are colonizing.
The church should be a place where wounded people can come, and be made well again, not with flashy miracles, but by finding a safe place where they can unbandage and bare their wounds in a community of love and forgiveness. from Painting with Ashes: When Your...
We must normalize the awareness of the realities of mental illness, especially within the church. We must remove the negative stigmas surrounding therapy and counseling. One of the most common and most hurtful phrases I heard in my journey with mental illness was...
Faith was never intended to be a destination, a status, a holding tank, or a warehouse. Instead, it was to be a road, a path, a way out of old and destructive patterns into new and creative ones. If a spiritual community only points back to where it has been, or if it...
Conflict is a natural part of being in a community. It cannot be avoided or controlled by anyone, but it can be an agent of change. When you approach conflict from a defensive posture, it can escalate the situation to where a third party is needed to help resolve the...
Love erases the line between giving and receiving. When love is present, we are all just sharing; there are no haves, there are no have nots, just people who need one another. The foolish distinction between who is giving and who is receiving, between who has much and...
Death of a loved one is a tear in the social fabric…it evokes two great needs, both of them very public. First, the body must be cared for and given disposition. Second, the community needs to tell once more the story of the life of the one who has died and the...
In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive our community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.