But the Gospel doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, “Welcome! There’s bread and wine. Come eat with us and talk.”...
…the promise of the Gospel [is] not that we can be in control, or even that God is in control, but rather that God in Jesus joins us in our out-of-controlness, holds onto us, and brings us to the other side.
We desperately need to explore how much of our understanding of the Gospel is American and how much is biblical.
The Gospel is less about how to get into the Kingdom of Heaven after you die, and more about how to live in the Kingdom of Heaven before you die.
Shame seems most widespread and deepest among the very people who take rightness and goodness most seriously. It is a dimension of condemnation that reaches into the deepest levels of our souls. In shame we are self-condemned for being the person we are. It touches...
Let us then tell the truth. Before the Gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of our own lives, of your life and my life. It is life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it, not in terms of the words you make it bearable...
I am maybe the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for, as I have read in the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion, but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems...