Opinion

Might churches claim and enact a kind of gospel triage, responding with immediacy and intentionality to the external/internal struggles of persons impacted by gun violence?

Where are the churches willing to model vulnerability? I’ll tell you what they look like. They have given up on Christendom. They have given up on the notion that they hold some place of privilege in our culture.

Can we feel that there are human beings, very close to us, created in God’s image, who are being buried? If we cannot, perhaps we need to be silent and attentive in order to listen to their stories of suffering due to spiritual, social, economic, and/ or physical conditions that are foreign to us.

Amy and I had a fight last week. Well, let’s call it a disagreement. Since we share all pastoral responsibilities at our church, we try to be careful to distinguish between professional and personal issues. I think this was both….

¿Podemos sentir que hay seres humanos muy cerca, creados a la imagen de Dios, que están siendo enterrados? Si no podemos, tal vez debemos guardar silencio y poner mucha atención para así poder escuchar sus historias de sufrimiento debido a condiciones espirituales, sociales, económicas y/o físicas que nos son desconocidas.

In these troubled times, we now pay tribute to our savior. It is in you we find our safety and security. It is to you we run when we are threatened; when our enemies come against our children and our families, we turn to you.

I recognize our anti-Semitic history, cognizant of how our Jewish sisters and brothers suffered at the hands of Christians for centuries; but this does not excuse the oppressed of history wielding the power of the oppressors.

When a congregation wants to get, stay or remain healthy, one of the key questions it asks has to do with the balance between its internal and an external focus. One excellent congregational exercise to help with this question is…

For the right, the flag is worth honoring and protecting. For the left, racial issues tear at the fabric of what it means to be human. Which one is right?

Many elements of Lost Cause religion were rooted in distorted biblical hermeneutics, interpretative methods that gave proof texts for anti-Semitism, chattel slavery, Jim Crow separatism and white privilege.