Guarding God’s Reputation…
Have you ever sat through a sermon or a talk and heard the speaker express a view about God that made you think, “Well that makes God sound petty and small”? Usually the speaker means well, but has not thought deeply. An advantage of being 65 and of having preached my first sermon when I was 15 is that I now have half a century of sermon “thou shalt not’s” to sift through. In their own way they each say something about what the speaker thought about God, or perhaps didn’t think, because sometimes we make God sound so very mean and so very trivial. One that...
Read MoreChurch: A messy, risky but still powerful ideal (Part 2 of So what is church?)
Part 1 of this post set about answering the question, ‘So what is church?’ suggesting that church is a simple, but powerful idea. It did so in response to the earlier post on churchless faith – a growing phenomena that often sees people, in spite of their faith commitment, simply shrug and say, ‘Church – too difficult, too painful, too boring, too political, too time consuming, too compromised, too controlling, too irrelevant’ – or something comparable. They then quietly (or not so quietly) withdraw from active involvement from any local church. As...
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