To paraphrase Paul, God often uses the cheesy to confound the sophisticated. He regularly honors those who are confused about his leading as if they have nailed it.
As is typical of this God [of Israel], he calls his people into freedom in the most unlikely place.
As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, “the ‘weightlessness’ of contemporary belief in God is a reality…for religious liberals and many evangelicals.
The Good News does not hinge on words like do or change but on the powerless, irrelevant, and frightening words like belief and faith.
The wealthy, Jesus says, can only get into heaven through the eye of a needle; the same applies to churches wealthy in numbers and programs.
I sometimes wonder whether our churches–living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses–are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.
If the church is the body of Christ [who was disguised in servant form], why would we think the world would be able to pick us out of a crowd of other well-meaning organizations?
For his own unfathomable reasons, God chooses to disguise himself when he comes to this planet, and there have been few disguises better than the church.
To live [in the church] at the beck and call of marketing logic is to live in slavery.
The Christian life does not just evolve. It also requires specific decisions and public commitments to deepen our faith and obedience.
To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it.
[denial] is an attempt to bring order to our lives.
We say we long for intimacy with God and others, and yet we structure our lives so that this becomes impossible. One might think we are avoiding intimacy, that maybe we really like our finely managed lives just the way they are.