My sons and I have been watching our way through the three Star Wars prequels (insert Jar Jar Binks jokes here), as a way to get excited for the new film. For a couple of hours after every movie my kids and I end up inverting our sentence structures to mimic the way Yoda speaks. The other night I was reading some Merton & realized that if you invert the sentence structure of famous Thomas Merton sayings, it sounds an awful lot... Read more
Every year my church spends the month of November studying the lives of the saints of the church. Last week we looked at the life and contribution of Lesslie Newbigin. Lesslie Newbigin was born in 1909 in Newcastle, England. Thus he came of age in a time of great cultural upheaval. He was just a boy while World War I devastated Europe. As a young college student he saw the world economy collapse (1929). His international ecumenical work gave him a front... Read more
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” ― G.K Chesterton “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson “I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue... Read more
Liz Kanoy, an editor at Crosswalk.com, is one of the writers I check in with now and then, just to see what she’s thinking about and writing about. You can see more of what she’s written here. Kanoy always seems to write about matters that matter, not just to see how many shares she can get, so I was excited to see that she engaged with the article I wrote on the language we use about terrorist attacks, “Dear France, Don’t... Read more
This fall my church, Redemption Church in KC, took three weeks to turn our focus to the topic of the beautiful. We did a three part sermon series and a few side classes during which we took the famous line from Fyodor Dostoevsky “Beauty Will Save the World,” as our jumping off point. It’s fascinating how often this quote is used without the context. In fact, when the line appears in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot, it is a question. “Is it true, Prince,... Read more
Every year my church spends the month of November studying the lives of the saints of the church. This was an attempt to commend to us the lives of those everyday saints all around us, who point the way to a good life, and give mercy and grace hands and feet in our world. The outline format reflects the way I manuscript my sermons… just makes it easier for me to try and memorize as much as I can. Every year we... Read more
It’s Not War, It’s Murder: Why the Language We Use about Terrorist Attacks Really Matters. My heart goes out to the people of France, especially the residents of Paris. When faced with such unspeakable violence and barbarism humans cannot help but experience a visceral loss of our sense of security. The fear resulting from such a loss can send us straight into our limbic system, and it’s fight, flight, or freeze. America came out fighting. Will France have the discipline to choose an... Read more
One day, when science had become incredibly advanced. Thanks to the efforts of by bio-medical engineers, most human diseases had been eradicated, and the infant mortality rate was almost zero. Thanks to genetic engineers, nearly all birth defects and genetic diseases could be reversed immediately, and people were living longer than ever. They even learned how to clone human beings in the laboratory, so if anyone died, they could just make a new version of them. So, the scientists and engineers all got together and... Read more
The mission of God is unmanageable. This is where the conversation about missional leadership begins. When it comes to the kingdom of God, we cannot control outcomes with even the most ingenious models, techniques, and strategies. God is going to do what God is going to do with the church, and God can never be controlled or manipulated. The mission of God is unmanageable. If it’s true that we cannot control the outcomes of ministry, and I think it is, then all... Read more
Every year my church spends the month of November studying the lives of four different saints. Typically I only hear the name Walter Rauschenbusch when it precedes a misleading caricature of the Social Gospel movement. Here’s my attempt to commend this great saint to the church. In one of my favorite seminary courses we were assigned the book A Theology for the Social Gospel, by Walter Rauschenbusch. I had never heard of Rauschenbusch, so my plan was to hurry through it so I could... Read more
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