Welcome to the 10th day of Lent. Matthew 19:13-15 is the passage for today, the scene of Jesus, the children, and the trap of God-talk.
Your theology is just a theory.
Your theology is just a theory. No matter how precious. Even when you can back up each clause with scripture, or appeal to your favorite theologian. Are you balking already? Maybe you’re sure your theology the very truth handed down from the apostles. A lot of us think that! Before you assume I’m telling you […]
Did you know your Christian hero was a theological mess?
The internet has made two things very clear about the Christian community. First, a lot of us love to be right. Second, we feel especially right when we can castigate someone else for being wrong. Somewhere we got this idea that the thing God cares about most is that all of our theology is correct. […]
Why The Church Has To Stop Saying Sexual Sin Is The Most Important Thing.
Somewhere back in time someone decided that sexual sin is the worst kind of sin. In many churches sexual sin is the line over which you may not cross. Sex before marriage is the worst thing a Christian teenager can do. Sleeping around is the worst thing a Christian woman can do. Looking at pornography […]
I Quit the Culture War
(I wrote this in 2012, but the situation has only gotten worse. I feel even more strongly than I did then.) It’s an election year, apparently. I’ve noticed the sprouting yard signs and the increasing emotional urgency in political conversations. The internets buzz with people making their case and stomping their virtual feet. As a […]
If you feel like God, You will do justice.
I attended The Justice Conference in Portland in 2012. This is part 2 of my reflections. You can catch up on part 1 (Love, Justice & the Problem of Indifferent Christians) here. Part 2: If You Feel Like God, You Will Do Justice. As I sat through speaker after speaker at the conference, one question kept surfacing for […]
Myth #1: God’s Not Emotional.
I remember seeing a Jesus movie as a kid, sometime in the middle seventies. The Jesus in that film was haunting. His long, blond hair hung limp down the sides of his gaunt face, framing piercing blue eyes that could see, I imagined, right into your heart. He spoke quietly. His words were delivered in […]
5 Things You Learned About Emotion in Church That Aren’t True.
Have you ever experienced a paradigm shift? This isn’t just learning new information. This is when you discover something that changes the way you see everything. It’s the difference between thinking that the earth might revolve around the sun, instead of the other way around. I’m in the middle of a paradigm shift right now. […]
Rich Mullins on what Christianity is Not.
Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved […]
A Worship Short-Circuit.
I was preaching from the book of Jonah once and came across an interesting thought about worship. Most people know the set-up to the story, of course. Jonah gets tapped by God to go “cry out” against the wickedness of the city of Nineveh. But Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian empire, and […]
Worshipping as a Child.
I was reading in Matthew this morning and came across a little scene that sparked my thoughts. It’s the well-known passage where the disciples keep some children from coming to Jesus, and Jesus corrects them. Here’s the passage, Luke 19:13-14. “Then people brought little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray […]
Write Your Own Psalm (v1)
Note: There is an updated version of this post here: Try This: Write A Psalm Christians know, of course, that the Bible is meant to occupy a central role in our lives and worship. Many of us grew up with some kind of morning devotion or “quiet time” practice and we’ve all heard that we’re supposed […]