One of the biggest mistakes we make when talking with others about faith, whether in evangelism or preaching and teaching Scripture, is that we assume we’re all talking about the same thing when we say “God.”
[Read more…] about Do You Know What You’re Talking About When You Say “God”?
“Why do I spend all this time on these sermons if people forget almost everything I say by the time they’re halfway home?!? Sermons are so ineffective!”
Jared was a little worked up. He’s a pastor, and he was realizing that what he put the most ministry effort into (his sermons) was bearing very little tangible fruit in the lives of the people of his congregation.
[Read more…] about 4 Kinds of Sermons That Will Cripple Discipleship
How do we respond when people we love and care for are questioning faith? Perhaps they’re beyond questioning and have actually left Christian faith, like the recent public announcements from Joshua Harris and Marty Sampson.
How are we to respond to when loved ones are questioning faith? Our friend Fr. Kenneth Tanner has some words of wisdom:
When it comes to friends, family and leaders who find themselves unable to trust the faith we share (and there are a myriad of reasons why a person might find themselves in that spot) it’s important that Christ followers respond from a place of trust, peace, empathy, and charity.
It does not help anyone and it does not commend our trust in Jesus Christ to circle wagons, to find fault, to panic, to lose our center.
I want to say something I feel is very important: A person can’t respond with wisdom to the hurting and bewildered, the now unconvinced, the ones who have found that God’s no longer necessary in their world (even if he exists), when that leader who is responding is embedded in the problem culture from which others are departing.
You have to stand in another place, attentive to the voices of the dead, with whom you (every day) pray, sing, and study, with whom you mystically dine every week and with whom you have learned that wrestling with the questions (not finding the answers)—wrestling indeed with God, suffering with God at the foot of his cross, yes, dying with God—is where every human finds life.
We find life standing with God as he dies for the world he loves.
Too many of us want to solve all the mysteries and have all the knowledge and hand down all the prophecy but we end up sounding like ‘clanging cymbals.’ What we need to learn is how to die.
We come to the church of the ages (without number, without divisions, mighty like an army with banners dipped in their own blood, warriors of a peace that confounds all reason) to learn how to be human as God is human in Jesus Christ.
And here we learn that to be human as God is human is to die between criminals as a criminal so that every image bearer, indeed the entire cosmos we inhabit, might have life.
In others words we learn that only Love is credible, only this Love is believable.
God is revealed to us as the servant who comes the first time and every time to serve his creation.
Our disposition, our temperament, towards all humans—believing or unbelieving—is made clear by Paul. Paul names our disposition by the same name with which John names God:
If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
1 Corinthians 13:1-7 NLT
A couple summers ago, Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook could replace the church. He argued that his technology platform could create a sense of community the face of falling church membership.
Christian leaders, predictably, objected to this idea, but Skye Jethani responded to the hulabaloo with a thread of messages on Twitter that highlight a subtle problem with these objections: much of the church is just as enamored with the “dis-incarnation” of technology as Zuckerberg is.
One of the notions a lot of us hold somewhat unconsciously is that God’s commands are mainly about getting us to behave better. We think God has set up some rules and he’ll reward us if we follow them.
[Read more…] about God Isn’t Trying to Make You Behave Better
Most people have the wrong idea about the “cost of discipleship.”
When Bonhoeffer first coined the phrase, it was a helpful corrective to a very nominalistic faith. But nowadays the phrase “cost of discipleship” stirs up images of spiritual heroes: those who’ve heeded the call and have become a special elite kind of Christian. The Few. The Proud. The Disciples.
[Read more…] about Why the Cost of Discipleship Is Lower Than You Think
