I’ve been pondering the cost of being a leader who has the courage and tenacity to tell the truth. We can all agree that we need leaders who do, but how exactly do we sell the vocation of truth-telling when our own human story makes it pretty likely that if you tell a hard truth long enough you will lose your life?
In narrating our lives, we know how they end. It’s the middle chapters that are missing.
Our final chapters have been written. On that great gettin’ up morning, we will see Jesus, and we will be like him, having been freed from death. We know how the story ends, but we do not know how we get there. The middle chapters are missing.
A rebirth of compassion?
A rebirth of compassion is inseparable from conversion, not as Jesus vaccination, but as a continuing religious experience with the resurrected Christ. We encounter a rebirth of our identity as followers of the Jesus Way, a compassion that compels us to revisit the meaning of the gospel at every human/humane turn.
Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump and the King David Defense
Bible characters are not there for Christians to compare and excuse the immoral behavior but are there for us to hear God’s story of how humanity messes up constantly. The Bible is a story of God’s people struggling with living rightly. It’s a story of sin, forgiveness, redemption and grace.
It’s Holy Week — and time to confront scripture passages which vilify Jews
For more than just the cross, or sunrise services, or the Easter Bunny, this time of year is also known for something else: the reading of the most virulent biblical passages regarding anti-Semitism.
A white Jesus can’t save a brown child
I was raised in a brown evangelical church in a small, predominantly white town in central Texas. Our “mother” church was one of the many First Baptist Churches in the Texas Bible Belt. Our congregation was composed mainly of poor, uneducated, largely undocumented migrants from rural Mexico. And while we were a brown church, the Jesus we worshiped was white.
What we can learn from Chance the Rapper
When and where am I speaking boldly and prophetically about faith and justice, pushing the world around me to fully examine its complicity in maintaining systems of power and privilege that do repeated harm to bodies and psyches unable to protect themselves?
It’s a small world after all … and we need to survive together
The truth of the matter is that we human beings are stuck in this small world that we have to share in order to survive. How can we do it successfully?
Es un mundo pequeño después de todo … y necesitamos sobrevivir en conjunto
La verdad es que, como seres humanos, todas las personas del mundo estamos realmente atrapadas en este pequeño mundo que tenemos que compartir para poder sobrevivir. ¿Cómo podemos hacerlo con éxito?
If character is ‘irrelevant’ in politics, eventually the Church will be, too
It is a confusing time, but one thing is crystal clear to me: if committing an adulterous affair with a porn star, if that kind of morality and that kind of character is “completely irrelevant” to a Church that has always said exactly the opposite, there is another thing that will be “completely irrelevant” to today’s culture — and that is, sadly, the Church.
You CAN go home again
When we use our imaginations, our grief and loss have the potential to become the silent, fertile seedbed for redemptive, life-giving deeds.
Saving John Oliver: 10 suggestions for retaining young people in the church
The form of religion we have inherited was packaged for mass appeal. It can still be sold to the Boomers, but the Millennials aren’t buying. And that’s a blessing.