Misdiagnosis Of Church

"When any species undergoes a reproduction crisis, a name is giving it: "endangered." Arguably Christianity has entered such a crisis; our inability to reproduce the faith is the number one problem facing our families and churches today. Christianity in the West has become a sterile, exhausted religion. . . .

The dominant means of addressing the church's reproduction crisis has been to devise new methodologies and strategies for how we do church. This is a misdiagnosis of the problem, however, and without the right diagnosis of the disease, I cure is difficult."

-Leonard Sweet. From Tablet To Table.

Punching Holes In Darkness

"Robert Louis Stevenson, who was very ill as a child, recorded a childhood incident in his diary. He was seated by a window at nightfall, watching a lamplighter light the street lights below. His nurse came into the room and asked him what he was doing. “I’m watching a man make holes in the darkness,”

- Leonard Sweet

You Cain't Compromise Enough For Pagans

The Trap

"Somewhere along the way, Christianity Today exchanged social convenience for the truth. Like many Christians, you have fallen for the mistaken belief that if you present yourself as caring about what progressives care about, then you will be spared from their slander and suppression. You will not. And the Left has made that clear. It has weighed your desperate pleas for acceptance and still has found you wanting."

- CARMEN SCHOBER. May 23, 2020. An Open Letter to Christianity Today: Change Course or Step Aside.

Why Are You Managing My Spirituality?

"For once, my place with God in solitude would be honored - not managed or directed or interpreted by a pastor or a Bible study leader or anyone else who thought they knew what I needed.

For once, I wasn't going to have to force myself into someone else's prefabricated plan for my spiritual enrichment. 

I was so glad we had been instructed not to talk, because this meant no one could intrude by asking me what was wrong or trying to "help."

- Ruth Barton. "Sacred Rhythms"

Confined To Philosophy

"When Zeno learned that the only ship he had left was with all its freight lost at sea, he said, "Fortune, you deal kindly with me, confining me to my threadbare cloak and the life of a philosopher."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals

Pride In Our Today!

"I find it odd that the church of the twenty first century thinks so highly of what the Holy Spirit has taught it today that it thinks so little of what the Holy Spirit has taught the church in the 1st century, the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, and so on. The Holy Spirit is not unique to our age. The Holy Spirit has been at work in the church for the past twenty one centuries.."

- Stephen Nichols -

I'm The Benovlent Dictator

"Things are better with me in charge."

"I'm trying to do great things for the good of people,

great things for the environment."

They always think they are the "benovlent dictator.""

- Tim Pool -

Interview on Joe Rogan. 

More of Jesus More Of His Saving Fulness See

"If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, “I am spiritual but not religious,” then I might not be any wiser about what that means—but I would be richer.....

In that context, people are usually trying to tell me that they have a sense of the divine depths of things but they are not churchgoers. They want to grow closer to God, but not at the cost of creeds, confessions, and religious wars large or small. Some of them have resigned from religions they once belonged to, taking what was helpful with them while leaving the rest behind......

Plenty of them are ‘satisfied, too, even as they confess that they are sometimes lonely.

I think I know what they mean by "religious". It is the "spiritual" part that is harder to grasp. My guess is they do not use that word in reference to a formal set of beliefs, since that belongs on the religion side of the page. It may be the name for a longing—for more meaning, more feeling, more connection, more life.

When I hear people talk about spirituality, that seems to be what they are describing. They know there is more to life than what meets the eye.... They would be happy for someone to teach them how to spend more time in the presence of this deeper reality, but when they visit the places where such knowledge is supposed to be found, they often find the rituals hollow and the language antique. 

Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of Faith have acquired a certain patients with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive its shortcomings as they have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journey. They do not need to walk off every Cliff all by themselves. Yet they too can Harbor the sense that there is more to life than they are being shown."

- Barbara Brown Taylor 

We Join The Stream Of Prayer.

Entering a constant flowing stream. It's nothing we've started, its only a stream we enter or not, we join or not.

We Are Joining Prayer

"We never begin to pray, we always enter into prayer that has already begun before us and without us, the prayer of the church. We may pray alone, but we are never alone when we pray."

Kim Fabricius

No Time To Show Jesus' Grave

"Well, those unchainedseem filled with what I lack somehow."

"They are," replied Sarkon. "They all are filled with Madness! Be grateful that you lack what they are filled with.

"Perhaps," said Everyman, staring vacantly into the dark sky.

"Do you believe the singer came alive again?"

"No-not at all. I know the man who buried him, you see. His grave is in a country field. . . ."

"Then let us go and dig him out and show the unchained men of Terra their great Folly and absurdity."

Sarkon blush. "I. . . .wh . . . ." He stammered much before he finally spoke.

"The grave, I must regret lies far away. We have not time enough to travel there today," he finally explained. He quickly changed the subject. It's just as well believe me.

- Calvin Miller. The Singer Trilogy (The Song)

Christians With A Bar Too Low To Inspire.

"Multitudes are now turning to Christ in all parts of the world. How unbearably tragic it would be, though, if the millions of Asia, South America and Africa were led to believe that the best we can hope for from the way of Christ is the level of Christianity visible in Europe and America today, a level that has left us tottering on the edge of world destruction. The world can no longer be left to Mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, I know that. But this is an age for Spiritual Heroes - a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that a pitching it's message to low."

- Dallas Willard. The Spirit of The Disciplines.

Human Cures For Suffering Fail

The modern age is an age of revolution — revolution motivated

by insight into the appalling vastness of human suffering and

need. Pleas for holiness and attacks on sin and Satan were

made for Centuries in response to the human situation. Today

such pleas have been replaced with a new agenda, Political and social critiques yield recipes for revolutions meant to liberate humankind from its many bondages. And on the

individual level various self-fulfilment techniques promise

personal revolutions bringing ’freedom in an unfree world'

and passage into the good life. Such are modern answers to

humanity's woes.

Against this background a few voices have continued to

emphasise that the cause of the distressed human condition,

individual and social ~ and its only possible cure — is a spiritual one. But what these Voices are saying is not clear. They point out that social and Political revolutions have

shown no tendency to transform the heart of darkness that lies deep in every human being. That is evidently true. And amid a flood of techniques for self-fulfilment there

is an epidemic of depression, suicide, personal emptiness, and

Escapism through drugs and alcohol, cultic obsession, consumerism, and sex and violence — all combined with an inability to sustain deep and enduring personal relationships so obviously the problem is a spiritual one and so must be the cure."

- Dallas Willard. The Spirit of The Disciplines.