If the church is to survive as a place where head and heart are equal partners in faith, then we will need to commit ourselves once again not to the worship of Christ, but to the imitation of Jesus. His invitation was not to believe, but to follow. Since it was once...
My hope is to interpret the life and example of Jesus in a redemptive and relevant way. Each generation must do this with Jesus, lest it be forced into stale beliefs that strain credibility and diminish life. For the joy of Christian faith is not to be found in the...
In a world that is desperate for something real, many mega-churches today are like Disney World plus God, while too many mainline churches are serving up bits and pieces of the Great Books Club. One wonders which fiction is most cruel, that all your dreams can come...
In our zeal for mass conversion and standard strategies, we overlook the fact that evangelism requires far more than effective methods. The gospel is not a consumer product to be marketed by drawing from a strategic tool kit. People come to faith in Christ through a...
It’s not that if they accept Jesus into their life then “Bam! Life is great!” Accepting Jesus into their life does mean that Jesus is walking alongside them in their pain, frustration, and loneliness. And salvation is wrapped up in that.
Being born-again is a new life, not of perfection but of striving, stretching, and searching—a life of intimacy with God through the Holy Spirit. There must first be an emptying and then refilling. To the extent that we want to know, understand and experience God, we...
Jesus was not interested in making people religious, but leading them to a loving relationship with himself, and therefore with God. He offered forgiveness and healing to sin-sick souls as the basis of new life, opening up a path of discipleship, compassion and...
With the lingering taste of bread and wine, broken bread and empty cup, Jesus stared into the depths of the cup before him, the cup filled to the brim with suffering and death, even more, dereliction and abandonment. Agony filled Gethsemane. from A Scandalous...
It’s strange. We think of ourselves as needing him but we don’t think of Jesus as needing us. Yet we believe he sacrificed himself for us while we give little thought to the fact that real communion requires us to also sacrifice ourselves for him… Usually it is a...
Community is not easy. Somebody once said, “Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” In Jesus’ community of twelve apostles, the last name was that of someone who was going to betray him. That person is always in your...