"Prosperity gospel" is saying certain principles, behaviors, practices, and obedience is necessary for God's blessing. If it's essentially "God wants you to do X and you (or your children) will be Y," that's a transactional relationship with God.
--Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you’re really strangers. --Having a dream is what keeps you alive. Overcoming the challenges makes life worth living. --Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage....
Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we're supposed to be and embracing who we are.
As we prepare for the Lenten pilgrimage, we brace ourselves for what we might learn and experience through faithful practices that call us back to God. We begin with the smear of mortality on our foreheads, signifying that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Like...
I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.
Transformation isn't sweet and bright. It's a dark and murky, painful pushing. An unraveling of the untruths you've carried in your body. A practice in facing your own created demons. A complete uprooting before becoming. from Edge of Wonder
I’ve come to see that the call of God, the love that bids us welcome, is always a call to become the true you. Not a doormat. The true you. Not an imitation of someone else. The true you: someone made in the image of God, deserving of and receiving love. The ability...
The true purpose of all spiritual disciplines is to clear away whatever may block our awareness of that which is God in us... It will be in order to suggest certain simple aids to this end. One of these is the practice of silence, or quiet. As a child I was accustomed...
One of the most serious dangers confronting those who minister in the city is that their lives come to be built on frenzy and compulsive busyness. This usually leads to a lack of focus, a tendency to accumulate more and more things, a collapse of reflection, and the...
God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all--no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals or how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.