Category: Almost a Tweet

8

To prioritize scripture above all else doesn’t guarantee relationship with God any more than studying every baby photo of a prospective spouse. But to get rid of scripture would no more change who God is than throwing away said photos. Relationship happens through the convoluted process of learning past, embracing present, and committing to the future.

24

To authentically share the gospel is to give away a piece of our deepest self. We cannot go unchallenged or unchanged in the process of evangelism. To attempt to share the gospel is, therefore, one of the most dangerous things we can do – not because the world might respond with violence, but because the vulnerability required to authentically share necessarily entails giving up control of who we become in the process.

27

There is no point in striving to be the church where people give their life to Jesus; salvation is an act of God and not human striving or strength. What matters is becoming the kind of church that gives its life for the sake of its neighbor; by submitting our lives to one another through the grace of God, we create the space in which God’s children are embraced and find new life.

26

Lent is the tightrope walk between self sufficiency (we must refuse arrogance) and self destruction (we must not cause depression). Faithfully walking the tightrope does not take the form of a middle way or a combination of the two – faithfulness is found in relationship with the God who created our bodies from the dust of the earth and offers everlasting life through Jesus Christ.

25

Conservative Christianity fails in the same way modernism fails – it seeks an objective story to become the authority for everyone to read and comprehend.

Liberal Christianity fails in the same way postmodernism fails – it denies that there is an authoritative story to be told, and rather seeks a concept without a story, perhaps love, to be authority.

The only way to avoid these pitfalls is to subject ourselves to the grace of God by engaging in the practices of life that form the agent capable of reading and embodying the story that forms and is formed by the tradition over time that we call church.

22

Modernism is the assumption that I can tell the objective story of all that is through rationality alone.

Postmodernism is the rejection of the assumption that there is an objective story to be told.

Postmodernism destroyed the story when what we need to destroy is the notion of an “I” apart from story.

Christianity is the assumption that there is no “I” to tell a story apart from the story of God that writes and is written by us.