While an adventurous spirituality does not claim to provide scientific data that proves God's ever-transforming power throughout the universe, the vision of God's holy adventure boldly asserts that God is continually working in our personal, planetary, and cosmic...
The issue should not be oversimplified into whether people will live by God's word or mere human teaching. Given this choice, all religious people will choose "God's word." But for all sides of the debate, God's word is not available directly, only through human...
We can either stay within the Christianity we have mastered with the Jesus we have domesticated, or we can leave Christianity as a destination, embrace Christianity...as a way of life, and then journey to reality, where God is present and living in every person, every...
To love is to know God precisely because God is love. The emerging community, at its best, can teach us again that love must be the first word on our lips and also the last, and that we must seek to incarnate that sacred word in the world. I recently heard a...
Salvation is personal, but this hardly needs emphasis... What does need emphasis is that Salvation in the Bible is also social. Ancient Israel's story is a story of the creation of a new people, a nation, a community. Salvation is about life together. Salvation is...
There is not a syllable in the Pauline letters that can be cited in support of Christians employing violence. Paul's occasional uses of military imagery (e.g., 2 Cor. 10:3-6, Phil. 1:27-30) actually have the opposite effect: the warfare imagery is drafted into the...
Jesus calls his disciples, giving us authority to heal and sending us out. He doesn't show us how to reliably...make a blind man see, dry every tear, or even drive out all kinds of demons. But he shows us how to enter into a way of life in which the broken and sick...
I now read Christ's being "lifted up" as image language echoing a passage in the letter to the Ephesians that speaks of God putting all things "under his feet" (Ephesians 1:22). As a beautiful paraphrase puts it: God has put everything without exception into Christ's...
By simply gathering on the Lord's day, as Christians have done from the first days, by forming a genuine community not just in word but in deed, the assembly bucks the trend of society. In doing so we are allowing ourselves to be shaped by God, and thereby place...
The newly-converted Saul is welcomed, baptized, and shares in the table fellowship of the church. Paul says that he was given "the right hand of fellowship" (Gal. 2:9). The enemy is addressed as "Brother Saul." Conversion is not an individualistic attainment or...