It's Always A Good Idea To Have

We Need To Be Politically Engaged, But Peculiar In How We Engage. Jesus And The Early Christians Had A Marvelous Political Imagination. They Turned All The Presumptions And Ideas Of Power And Blessing Upside Down.

There Are Congregations On Nearly Every Corner. I'm Not Sure We Need More Churches. What We Need Is A Church. I Say One Church Is Better Than Fifty. I Have Tried To Remove The Plural Form Churches From My Vocabulary, Training Myself To Think Of The Church As Christ Did, And As The Early Christians Did. The Metaphors For Her Are Always Singular - A Body, A Bride. I Heard One Gospel Preacher Say It Like This, As He Really Wound Up And Broke A Sweat: "we've Got To Unite Ourselves As One Body. Because Jesus Is Coming Back, And He's Coming Back For A Bride Not A Harem.

Christianity Is At Its Best When It Is Peculiar, Marginalized, Suffering, And It Is At Its Worst When It Is Popular, Credible, Triumphal, And Powerful.

The Problem Is That The Chicken-soup-for-the-soul Stuff May Feel Good, But None Of That Typical Stuff Helps When Somebody In Your Neighborhood Is Murdered.

There Is A Movement Bubbling Up That Goes Beyond Cynicism And Celebrates A New Way Of Living, A Generation That Stops Complaining About The Church It Sees And Becomes The Church It Dreams Of.