It is not the task of the church to "Make America Great Again." The contemporary task of the church is to make Christianity countercultural again. And once we untether Jesus from the interests of empire, we begin to see just how countercultural and radical Jesus'...
A friend does not sacrifice another for political reasons whether the politics be secular or religious. Jesus certainly doesn't. To do one in the name of the other is not just fraudulent but slanderous.
Some people believe the alternative to bad religion is secularism, but that's wrong... The answer to bad religion is better religion--prophetic rather than partisan, broad and deep instead of narrow, and based on values as opposed to ideology.
The church isn't losing the next generation of Christians because of pluralism, secularism, or liberalism. The church is losing the next generation of Christians because of pursuing political power by any mean necessary rather than the power of Christ's love with...
God is not a belief-system. Jesus is not a religion. Christianity is not a check-list. Church is not an address. The Bible is not a book of doctrines. Community is not a meeting. Grace has no exceptions. Ministry is not a program. Art is not carnal. Women are not...
Choral music was founded, nurtured, and developed almost exclusively within the Christian church for hundreds of years. To participate in choral singing is to participate in a historically Christian art form. If you choose to sing in a choir and do it with an accurate...
Love is dangerous because it always threatens to change us and to demand our penitence. It is the opposite of the forces which try and keep us and the world as it is. Divine love moves us and the creation on towards the as yet unseen fullness of the purpose of God for...
All Saints Day and All Souls Day are the feasts of every saint and of every soul who has died and gone home into the eternal love of God. All of them and therefore not only those already celebrated…but also the silent, unknown ones who have departed as if they had...
Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine...
There is no genuine Christianity where the sign of the Cross is absent. Cheap grace is grace without the Cross, an intellectual assent to a dusty pawnshop of doctrinal beliefs while drifting aimlessly with the cultural values of the secular city. Discipleship without...