The coronavirus pandemic, like the handwriting on the wall in Daniel 5, has interrupted our nation’s imperialist and idolatrous banquet of materialism, racism, white religious nationalism and militarism that Martin Luther King Jr. prophetically identified as lethal threats to the country and the world.
Sermons about Sodom are timely, but not for reasons you may think | #intimeslikethese
The story of Lot and Sodom is relevant and timely, if we see it as a story of radical hospitality.
A tale of two futures for your church | #intimeslikethese
Every day brings increasingly urgent instructions to retreat physically away from others. While that is a physical necessity, a corresponding relational move toward others is a massive opportunity to show the difference we make in our communities.
The ‘Common Weeping’: Instead of airing our grievances, let’s uncover our griefs | #intimeslikethese
If we truly enter into the “Common Weeping” during this time of tragic suffering, we can be saved from our cruder emotions. Instead of airing our grievances, let’s uncover our griefs. The first destroys community; the second builds it.
Social distancing in Jesus’ name | #intimeslikethese
Irrespective of how COVID-19 ultimately unfolds, Christians should be the biggest ambassadors of faith, hope and love in its midst, on account that we are resident aliens on borrowed, blood-bought time down here anyhow.
COVID-19 may be novel, but there’s nothing new about the virus of poverty | #intimeslikethese
Maybe this unwanted virus could serve as an invisible stranger, confronting us at the riverside of our own generosity (that should not be necessary), begging us to ask the obvious question: Why are so many children so poor to begin with?
Are your streamed worship services or sermons technologically unsophisticated? GOOD | #intimeslikethese
Not only is it okay for your church to be terrible at video production; in my view, it may be preferable. Don’t assume you have to embrace digital media in order to be “relevant.”
Broken community in the face of pandemic: For me, social distancing is nothing new | #intimeslikethese
Millions are now experiencing the social distancing and isolation I have felt in the months following my kidney transplant. I hope they will also experience the kind of creative love and care my church offered me.
‘This is the end of the world!’ (again): past lessons for a present crisis | #intimeslikethese
Online or as gathered community, through PayPal or the offering plate, when it is “sanctuary and when it isn’t, we cling to the gospel and the church, not as a hymn-singing non-profit, but as the Body of Christ.
I wish we’d all been ready | #intimeslikethese
Looking for signs of the end times doesn’t prepare us to live in times of crisis; it only allows us to spiritualize real-world problems and imagine a divine intervention that frees us from earthly responsibility to address social inequality, disease and global disaster.
Leaving the corners of our fields unharvested for the sake of the most vulnerable | #intimeslikethese
What if this, our most recent apocalypse, was met by a Church willing to do more than hastily broadcast its services online – a Church willing to love, serve and give up itself, and even its budget, for the sake of the world?
Quarantine confession: eating ice cream and longing for the gym | #intimeslikethese
Although I’m not quite ready to repent of it, I see that I’ve become one of those people who sees the world only through what suits me and my wants.