-
I write for the church
I am beginning to flesh out my book more. The working title is What Happened to My Church? Holding Onto Your Spiritual Family Without Tossing Out Your Faith. The intimidation factor is great. What do I have to say? What do I have to add? How do I write so I don’t sound angry or bitter and have no solutions?…
-
What is essential
Over the past few weeks I have listened to an argument online about the problems of evangelicalism. Two books that recently came out have seemed to arrive at different solutions because they perceive two different problems with evangelicalism. The Holy Post Podcast weighed on the books, the authors, and more in this episode and it is worth the listen. One…
-
Books… BOOKS… BOOKS!!!!
Over the last few years I have engaged a bit more with Southern writers. Those from the South who write about other things, and then Southern writers who write about the South. Lately I have taken in Pat Conroy and Greg Iles. They write honestly, but I have really loved the lyrical way they write. There is a beauty to…
-
The disappointment of the American Church
The Lord loves his Church. He has worked through all her failures over the centuries. He will still work with this current slice of the Church. I dated a note in my digital Bible when I read this passage: Isaiah 5:5–7 (NIV) 5 Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away…
-
9/11 — 25 Years Later
This will be the defining moment of my entire life. It is a defining moment for an entire generation, whether they realize it or not. The impact of that day and that time will keep on reverberating, and much of that reverberation will be because we have failed, as a culture, to dig deep and examine the impact of that…
-
There’s a Hole in the Boat
I finished re-watching “The News Room” for the … I don’t know how many… times. The writing of Aaron Sorkin draws me every time. The premise of the show, if you have not seen it, is a news crew on a cable channel that wants to do “real news” for their hour every night. My firm belief is that the…
-
Losses we have experienced
“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.…
-
The way of reform
I posed a question about reformation the other day, taking it from Chuck DeGroat’s post. Why isn’t the more beautiful way of Jesus compelling to us? What is the way forward? Do we want it? I came across a newsletter from Renovate that reposted a letter from Richard Foster he penned in 2000. What amazing timing. He wrote of ways…
-
How do we think of “scandal”
Chuck DeGroat wrote a post on “scandal” where he was asked what the worst scandal he had seen in his years of work. Like any of us, he thought of “big name” pastors or “big name” churches. Singular events that caused quite a stir. I certainly can look back in my lifetime and think of the “biggies” attached to my…
-
The elusiveness of beauty
The trouble with beauty, then, may not be that it resists definition. The trouble is that it refuses to remain an idea. Beauty asks something of us. It invites attention. It calls us beyond ourselves. It awakens longing for things that are true, good and whole. (More HERE) In the past few weeks I have pondered how I am so…
