Martha certainly wasn’t the first and she won’t be the last to dismiss someone else’s encounter with God because it didn’t fit the mold.
The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained.
We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more. When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave. And when we buried God in the ground, God got up.
We need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.
Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity.
The Holy Trinity doesn’t need our permission to carry on in their endlessly resourceful work of making all things new. That we are invited to catch even a glimpse of the splendor is grace. All of it, every breath and every second is grace.
But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation.
No step taken in faith is wasted, not by a God who makes all things new.
We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.
We are not spared death, but the power of death has been defeated. The grip of sin has been loosed. We are invited to share the victory, to follow the path of God back to life.
I can’t be a Christian on my own. I need a community. I need the church.
Evangelicalism is like my religious mother tongue. I revert to it whenever I’m angry or excited or surrounded by other people who understand what I’m saying. And it’s the language in which I most often hear God’s voice on the rare occasion that it rises above the noise.
We cling to the letter because the spirit is so much harder to master.
We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.
Perhaps we could push beyond these legalistic gender roles if we spent less time worrying about “acting like men” and “acting like women,” and more time acting like Jesus.
God and the Gay Christian is a game changer. Prepare to be challenged and enlightened, provoked and inspired.
I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it.
Like all who search for truth out of fear, I desperately wanted someone else to tell me exactly what to do.
Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; that latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue.
It is a tragic and agonizing irony that instructions once delivered for the purpose of avoiding needless offense are now invoked in ways that needlessly offend, that words once meant to help draw people to the gospel now repel them.
I don’t know why Christians keep fighting over which is better-singleness or marriage-when it seems rather obvious, both from Scripture and from Church history, that both can glorify God.