If every Christian family brought in a child who needed a family we would put the foster care system out of business.
When it comes to the big issues like immigration, everyone has a role. The government has a role. The church has a role. Every Christian has a role.
We have a relational problem with those who are suffering or who are different from us. All of us are most comfortable around people who are like us culturally and economically.
There is one big misunderstanding of the monastics leaving society.
We can ignore suffering no matter where we live. There are people who live a few miles from me who never see much poverty or the injustices that live on our doorstep.
There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing.
I like how someone once said being a Christian is not about having new ideas but having new eyes. This is the ability to have our hearts broken with the things that break the heart of God. That is part of what it means to be a Christian.
That is the power of the Eucharist. At the communion table you have rich and poor together in the early church and they were being challenged.
As my friend said that when people say the church is full of hypocrites, he says we always have room for more.
We can also cling to the treasures of our faith and get rid of the things that are cluttering that. It is a time we are seeing some trending away from the things that were cluttering our faith.
There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.
I have this certain reluctance when it comes to this idea that we are spiritual but not religious and we want Jesus but not the church. Why can’t we have both?
With the early Christians you couldn’t have God as your father unless you have the church as your mother. This isn’t accepting the church as a perfect thing.
The world is looking, not for Christians who are perfect, but for Christians who are honest and who are willing to be honest with some of our contradictions and hypocrisy.
The church is a place where broken people can fall in love with a beautiful God.
The more recent effort to encourage everyone to pray in common involves so many people.
The Eucharist is a symbol of that as you have bread, the staple food of the poor, and wine, a luxury of the rich, which are brought together at the table.
There’s an understanding of common prayer that I think we’re seeing grow, more and more. When I travel, I hear from people who are deeply touched that our common prayer takes time to remember some of the terrible tragedies that have happened around the world.
The best critique of what is wrong is the practice of something better. So let’s stop complaining about the church we’ve experienced and work on becoming the church we dream of.
Rather than finding the devil “out there,” we battle the devil within us. The revolution starts inside each of us.