This clip is incredibly powerful and serves as a sharp example of a prophetic word.
The further in and deeper down black preachers go into white evangelicalism the more anti-justice and anti-black they become.
We are not yet broken
I love David French. He pulls no punches. This past week my own (new to me) denomination has been exposed for mishandling sexual abuse claims in a diocese. French highlights that to point out the ongoing problems we have in the American Church.
Read moreClinging to “gospel”
Philip Yancey had an interview in Publisher’s Weekly reflecting on his upbringing. I wish I had been a bit quicker to my own realizations like Yancey, or Eugene Peterson. I’m a slow learner.
Read moreThe resurrection matters and it SHOULD be evident in the Church
When a church, or a church denomination, faces controversy, THIS SERMON gives a great example of how to expose the issue because it is necessary to expose the issue, and all the while still believing in the resurrected Christ.
Camera angles matter in a Zoom world
Online church has its challenges:
Put Not Your Hope in the Nation (Psalm 146)
Every line of this song is so deeply impacting to me. It is wonderful to listen to again and again.
One verse in particular:
He is the hope of the hungry
He is the Lord of the feast
Our Father’s house always opens wide
To welcome refugees
The church can do better
Twenty years ago the scandal of the Roman Catholic Church in Boston broke wide open with the series of stories of sexual abuse in the Boston Globe. Those revelations rippled through the Catholic Church year after year. I can remember the profound impact it had in the Twin Cities when I pastored there.
Over the past few years that abuse that has gone covered up in other parts of the American Church has slowly been revealed. As it tends to happen, scandals that break “out there” generally start to circle in tighter and tighter until it reaches a circle close to you… or a circle you are in. When it was “out there,” it was easy to look at the speck in someone else’s eye and think it was a log. Now, the log is revealed.
Read moreFrom fishermen to shepherds
When I first came into ministry it was the days of leadership development under guys like John Maxwell. There was the mantra: “Everything rises and falls on leadership.”
Read moreThe exhaustion of white spaces in evangelicalism
Many Black pastors have said, “Thank you so much for writing this book.” Or young Black people who find themselves in evangelical spaces coming out of the Black church said, “There’s finally a book that helps me explain where I come from.”
Read moreSetting the world right
“… evangelism, which will flourish best if the church is giving itself to works of justice (putting things to rights in the community) and works of beauty (highlighting the glory of creation and the glory yet to be revealed): evangelism will always come as a surprise. You mean there is more? There is a new world, and it has already begun, and it works by healing and forgiveness and new starts and fresh energy? Yes, answers the church, and it comes about as people worship the God in whose image they are made, as they follow the Lord who bore their sins and rose from the dead, as they are in dwelt by his Spirit and thereby given new life, a new way of life, a new zest for life.” — NT Wright, Surprised by Hope
Let us, as the Church, find this hope-shaped mission, abandon our dualism of “saving souls”, and truly be about the work of our Lord.
