In the church, we handle glory on a regular basis. Every time the church gathers, we talk about topics like: the greatness of God, the fact that God became a human being, our longing for redemption and our inability to save ourselves, the fact that Jesus has conquered death,...
In this post, I'm going to argue that the Church ought to be (1) a place to feel at home and (2) a place to feel like a foreigner or a pilgrim.
God has so constructed the Church, created as it is through the building material of the gospel, that...
Theologians and missiologists often use an important but difficult-to-understand concept: "incarnational living." Using terms like "incarnational" sometimes makes important concepts like these unnecessarily difficult, so I want to reframe this concept using terminology that will hopefully be a bit more familiar.
"Incarnational" refers to the "incarnation," the act in which...
I recently came across Dave Gibbons’ small book, Small Cloud Rising. I know nothing about Dave Gibbons or his ministry aside from the little I gleaned in reading the book, but I’ve been blogging about a “post-consumer” version of the Church, and I want to interact with some of...
In my previous post, I argued that consumerism has affected the church in ways that we rarely consider. We don’t try to convince church members that they need to be buying more stuff, but our structure and overall approach does tend to communicate that each person’s role in the...
In many American churches, consumerism is being used as a vehicle for the gospel. With lessons gleaned from the entertainment industry and the world of marketing, these churches present the gospel using forms of communication familiar to every American. Many people hear the gospel through this type of church....
I got serious about my faith when I entered college, and one fruit of this increased commitment was that I found myself turning into a reader. This newfound passion for reading would end up costing me way more money and time than I could have imagined (and at this...
Take a brief look at Church History and you'll realize that the Church is kind of an icky place. Or at least, it often has been. I love my church, and you probably love yours too. But historically speaking, the church has a tendency to be really really messed...
In my last post, I argued that repetition isn't as bad as we make it out to be. In fact, repetition is important. We are shaped by repetition—and that's true whether we are aware of the formative power of repetition or not. James K. A. Smith argues that we...
We all know what it's like to be bored with worship. Anyone who has been around the church for a while knows what it is to sing a praise song so many times that it becomes almost painful. Our worship services can become boring, predictable, numbing. And that's not...