It is currently meaningless to talk about Jesus forgiving sin.

It’s not that Jesus does not forgive sin or even that sin and forgiveness are not essential to faith and life. Sin and forgiveness are meaningless because we have so lost any conception of the kind of love and community for which God created us that we can no longer understand what an action or intent would be such that it could break community and thereby be definable as sin and then capable of being forgiven. Love and community come first. It is meaningless to speak of brokenness prior to experiencing that which is broken.

 

A body is not made up of parts. The body is the precondition necessary for a part to be what it is.

Likewise, a church is not made up of Christians. The church is the precondition necessary for a person to take part in God’s mission to love and change the world.

One can only be a Christian without taking part in church to the extent that a hand is only a hand in relation to the body from which it may be severed. The purpose, meaning, and nature of the individual has no coherence or consistency without first knowing the story in which that individual is living.

People are not the problem – people are the point.

If there is one fundamental, global change to which I hope to contribute over the course of my lifetime, it would be moving the needle on our assumptions and incentives to see the world through this lens.

Words on a page are meaningless. Life in relationship is where meaning is born. Emotion is the raw material of life. Story is the form of relationship.

Defining a term is only possible to the extent that it locates that term within a tradition of argument over the course of time. To define something per se would be to assume that there is an individual or a rationality that could exist without its located-ness within lived relationships. That we are community before we are individuals has to change the way we think about meaning and understanding because neither can exist without the life in which meaning and understanding are born and lived out.

Relationship is the story that is given but is never finished. Relationship can only be worked on and deepened or broken and harmed but never created new or fully ended.

The church is not a building.

The church is not a steeple.

The church is not a resting place.

The church is God’s mission to change the world.

The fact that scripture is written by people doesn’t mean that its language or truth is limited by its human authors. Writing itself is only ever a product of human community and can never be more than words on a page that we choose to accept or reject as an act of both remembering the stories that wrote us and transforming the stories we leave behind.

Church membership is not a responsibility that comes with privileges. Church membership is the privilege of taking part in God’s mission, which entails the responsibility to change the world.