My answer to a friend: There is no success in ministry, only service and moments of celebration. If you choose to minister, expect to be misunderstood. All of the pain people carry will fall upon your brow, and you shall be the stand-in for every ignorant statement...
There are two kinds of "everybody is welcome" churches: Everyone is welcome to conform to the church's image of what a Christian looks like. Everyone is welcome to fully embody the unique image God created them to be. Run away from the first and run toward the...
The American flag has been used like the image of the alabaster Jesus, a term coined by cultural critic James Baldwin. Jesus wasn’t born American, Christian or with pale pigmentation. White Jesus and the American flag started showing up in places of worship after the...
The Southern Baptist Convention is wrong. Women are worthy of God's calling and find freedom in Jesus Christ. Women are created in the image of the boundless and limitless God.
If we are to reJesus the church and remake it in our Founder's image, we need to go back to the daring, radical, strange, wonderful, inexplicable, unstoppable, marvelous, unsettling, disturbing, caring, powerful God-Man. The church needs to find itself in league with...
God’s image shines through us most clearly in the act of creation — comprising the three stages of Idea, Expression and Recognition — and by reproducing this act we may begin to grasp, by analogy, the Trinity. from Reaching for the Invisible God
Salvation in Jesus’ name is treated as a cure all. Supposedly, there is no suffering once we join the church, and if there is any cause for discomfort, then we vote the pastor out at the next business meeting. Ironically, we worship Jesus, who showed his wounds, but...
If I could make my neighbors up, I could love them in a minute. I could make them in my own image, looking back at me with deep gratitude for how authentically human I am being to them—and they to me!—reading poetry to each other, admiring pictures of each other’s...
The beauty of Christian spirituality is that the God we are in relationship with is for us in Christ. Like the father in the prodigal son story, God is waiting with his eyes looking for us in the distance. He is waiting to embrace us. This image might take some...
Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?------------------------------------------Gender-neutral version: Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among...