The heart is the inner face of your life. -Celtic Wisdom

Renewing the Church

All the power-mongers are before him —worshiping! All the poor and powerless, too… worshiping! Along with those who never got it together… worshiping! Psalm 22:29 MSG

Throughout church history, pastors spent most of the week out in the community, not in a church building. -Skye Jethani

Having a favorite preacher is someone you listen to. Having a favorite pastor is someone who listens to you.

Churches used to be transportation taking us into God’s presence. Now they’ve become the destination.

When we state our desire to be like Jesus, we are usually not referring to his anonymous years (1-30) nor his life style of being homeless and jobless.

This generation goes to a church where Jimmy Fallon is the pastor.

The people who we minister to everyday have to be slowly persuaded with an impersonation (read incarnation) of the love of Jesus intravenously through a drip bag. Its slow, relational, personal, making disciples, not at all like “church as usual”…in fact, we get so close you can watch their tears fall down their face upon his feet, you can hear the vase of their alabaster hope crack open when his fragrance floods their parched souls, you can literally watch the weight of shame drop off shoulders when he writes in the sand of their sin.

“Disciples do not want to hear a watered-down modern reinterpretation. They want nothing less than the substance of the faith of the apostles and martyrs without too much interference from modern pablum-peddlers who doubt that people are tough enough to take it straight. It has not been until the last quarter century that there has been wholesale devaluation of the currency of Christian language, symbolism, teaching and witness-a total sellout and bankruptcy to support the fixed habits of modem addictions. We have blithely proceeded on the skewed assumption that in theology-just as in corn poppers, electric tooth-brushes and automobile exhaust systems-new is good, newer is better and newest is best. So the “best” ones have by this logic cut themselves systematically off from sustained discourse with classical Christianity.” – After Modernity, What? by Thomas Oden

The Pastor – Eugene Peterson

Busyness is an illness of spirit.  The busy pastor is a lazy pastor.

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue.

Our faith develops out of the most difficult aspects of our existence, not the easiest.