Like all who search for truth out of fear, I desperately wanted someone else to tell me exactly what to do.
God’s ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.
Caring for the poor, resting on the Sabbath, showing hospitality and keeping the home—these are important things that can lead us to God, but God is not contained in them.
(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then.
Turns out, I wasn’t the only one struggling with doubt. I wasn’t the only one questioning my church’s position on homosexuality and gender roles, and a whole host of other issues. I wasn’t the only one who felt lonely on Sunday mornings.
Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God.
Faith is something you take a day at a time, not something you figured out at the start
Church isn’t about you! It’s about worshipping Jesus. Instead of being consumers, let’s go to church and ask what we can give Jesus because of all he has given us.
There is not a corner of this world that God has abandoned.
Wilhelm Dilthey puts it rather starkly, “Jesus came announcing the Kingdom of God, but what appeared was the church.
Seems to me that for you, evangelicalism is like the boyfriend you broke up with two years ago, but whose Facebook page you still check compulsively.
In the years preceding the Civil War in America, Christian ministers wrote nearly half of all defenses of slavery.
My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that’s good to keep in mind.
You can’t get too far into the Gospels without noticing that Jesus made a pretty lousy apologist.
When we refer to ‘the biblical approach to economics’ or the biblical response to politics’ or ‘biblical womanhood,’ we’re using the Bible as a weapon disguised as an adjective.
If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate and honor women, you will find them.
It is a tragic and agonizing irony that instructions once delivered for the purpose of avoiding needless offense are now invoked in ways that needlessly offend, that words once meant to help draw people to the gospel now repel them.
The Christian versions of the household codes were clearly progressive for their time, but does that mean they have the last word, that Christians in changing places and times cannot progress further?
Perhaps being a Christian isn’t about experiencing the kingdom of heaven someday but about experiencing the kingdom of heaven every day.
I don’t respect my husband because he is the man and I am the woman, and it’s my “place” to submit to him. I respect Dan because he is a good person, and because he has made me a better person too.
Those who say that having childlike faith means not asking questions haven’t met too many children.
(I should mention I attended a Christian elementary school where “my dad’s hermeneutic can beat up your dad’s hermeneutic” served as legit schoolyard banter.)
We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.
We tend to take whatever’s worked in our particular set of circumstances (big family, small family, AP, Ezzo, home school, public school) and project that upon everyone else in the world as the ideal.
While the word charity connotes a single act of giving, justice speaks to right living, of aligning oneself with the world in a way that sustains rather than exploits the rest of creation.
Cynicism may help us create simpler storylines with good guys and bad guys, but it doesn’t make us any better at telling the truth, which is that most of us are a frightening mix of good and evil, sinner and saint.
To Jesus, “by faith alone” did not mean “by belief alone.” To Jesus, faith was invariably linked to obedience.
As a Christian, my highest calling is not motherhood; my highest calling is to follow Christ.