You Can't Fix a Sin We Can't Identify

" The failure to name sin, to be able even to identify the Subject of sin, shows itself in the characteristic failures of theology. If we cannot name the systemic distortion we cannot effectively resist it. "

- Paul Axton

A Prayer For Fellowship

Father, to whom have you assigned me,

At this season in my life,

For their benifit and mine?

Suggested prayer for fellowship

- Stephen Crosby -

Meetings Have No Power

"Make life and love demand a meeting. Don't expect a meeting to produce life and love.

A meeting is just the dance hall for the potential of relationship.

We can have more kingdom, more fellowship, more relationship than we could ever handle.

But you know why we don't do it? Because it's slow and it's costly.

It's just easier to go to a meeting where I have LOW investment, and someone is going to preach to me."

- Stephen Crosby -

Dont Question Me Authority

"If as a Pastor or Minister, if you have to ask for honor and authority, it proves you don't have it, and you're not worthy of it. Those who are always talking about honor and authority have something wrong. Because, listen carefully, where love abounds, honor and authority are as natural as breathing."

- Stephen Crosby. Church refugee survival guide. Videos.

The Luxuary Of Self-Analysis

"........ a man of his generation and class had neither time nor opportunity for being sensitive and still less for the luxury of self-analysis. I am sure he was a painful mystery to himself. To all appearances he was a strong man, very much head of the family. As a child I felt relief safe when Daddy was around and terrified when he was a wood of the host. In my early childhood he was the embodiment of safety. The rude awakening did not come until the outbreak of War when I realized that he was, now, powerless to protect us."

- Ruth Burrows

Is Some Wanting of God Still In Your Heart?

".... And that the whole meaning of our existence and the one consuming desire of the heart of God is that we should let ourselves be loved, many spiritual persons would smile at my naïveté.

They are likely to murmer: 'But we know all that; we can read that in any spiritual book.. does she think she is telling us something new?' All I can say is that, although I too have known this in Theory, it is only now that it is integrated into my life. What is more looking at my dear friends, living for God, wanting only him, I see in fact that something is yet wanting to them...... 

They feel they are spiritual failures because this has not happened to them and that has not happen ed to them; they feel they have missed out on something because their experience carries none of the features which treatises on prayer and the contemplative life seem to demand as signs of a truly authentic spiritual life. They know they are loved by God and are pleasing to him and yet there is an indefinable anxiety.....

It seems to me that God is asking one thing more and only one thing more, and this, precisely, is what they are refusing to give. It is, in fact, the deepest self-denial and so different from the ways in which they are seeking to do things for God and, as it were, trying to wrest God's good pleasure from his reluctant heart. This refusal seems to me to spring from lack of insight and understanding, certainly not from lack of goodwill. I see these dear people, self giving, generous to a degree, full of life for God and yet still anxious, still hesitant before the last step which will release them from themselves and bury them in God. I see them turning, with a sense of failure, to new ideas on prayer which might perhaps "work better" though this is certainly not the term they would use...... 

I long them that there is no need for this, that here and now, in their present "unsatisfactory" state, in their "failure", God is giving himself to them, that this state of poverty is precisely what he wants and his way into them. 

- Ruth Burrows (she is a Carmelite Nun)

Ability To Say "No!" Expose Relationships

You can tell if you are

in a healthy, adult,

and functional human relationship

buy how people respond

when you tell them "No!""

- Stephen Crosby -

Deconstruction Of Religious Mindsets

"We are full of bible knowledge, we are all spiritually activated, but, we are humanly and relationally dysfunctional. We don't know how to be human beings well together. We need to be skillful humans, not just walking bible encyclopedias, with "organic" church insight.... They don't need your insight, they need your love, patience, endurance, your long-suffering....

Part of this deconstruction out of religious mindsets isn't to change our meeting formats. It's to be anew type of human being. A human being that actually pays attention. Who actually cares. Who actually listens.

- Stephen Crosby

As Question Instead Of Persuad Uninterested

"Saints, please listen to me. If you are still in persuasion mode, you still haven't learned anything yet.

What was Jesus's modality? "What do you want me to do for you?" We have not learned how to dignify another human being where they are "AT" ......

Jesus would dignify another person with an inquiry."

- Stephen Crosby

Slow Socalist Communists

“Your children’s children will live under communism. You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”

—Nikita Khrushchev

We Want the Fast Road To Growth God.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Small Things Are Divine

"Not to be constrained

by the greatest thing,

but to be contained

in the smallest thing,

is divine."

- Anonymous Inscription in a 1640 Flemish Jesuit volume commemorating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Jesuits.

God is Active Everywhere! Ignatius of Lyloia

This line from a poem by the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins captures a central theme of Ignatian spirituality: its insistence that God is at work everywhere—in work, relationships, culture, the arts, the intellectual life, creation itself. As Ignatius put it, all the things in the world are presented to us “so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.”

Ignatian spirituality places great emphasis on discerning God’s presence in the everyday activities of ordinary life. It sees God as an active God, always at work, inviting us to an ever-deeper walk.

When Debat Fails Use Totalarianism

"Plotted to kill him (Paul).

Enemies of the Gospel cannot defeat it by free and open debate, so they often resort to force, falsehood, murder, and governmental suppression."

- ESV Study Bible

Study note on Acts 19:23

Are You the Best State Soldier?

Does Jesus Christ 

and His Gospel call us to be the best military solider,

or the worst?

- Paul Axton -

Liberal Gospel

He perfectly characterized liberal Christianity as that in which

“A God without wrath

brought men without sin

into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

- Richard Niebuhr The Kingdom of God in America (1937)

More Than Rule Keeping - Image Bearers

In the story Tthe Bible is telling, humans were created for a purpose, ..... and the purpose was not simply "to keep the rules,"..... as you might suppose from innumerable books, sermons, hymns, and prayers. 

Humans were made to be "IMAGE-BEARERS," to reflect the praises of creation back to the Creator and to reflect the Creator's wise and loving stewardship into the world."

- N. T. Wright. The Day The Revolution Began 

Re-Branding Sin

"There was a time when the people who worried about "sin" were impertinent wrongdoers. Today, the wrongdoers aren't worried any more. The people banging on about "sin" are those who think it's someone else's problem.....

Some in the churches, fearful of moral anarchy, have tried to cling to the old rules. Others have switched attention to newer, more fashionable issues, still thumping the pulpit, but now warning against fossil fuels rather than fornication. The older "sins" have been replaced by newer ones; the fierce energy of earlier moralisms has been transferred now to issues like ecology, feminism, and international debt. Others again have thrown over the whole idea, so that self-righteousness - the idea that "our way of life" is superior to "theirs" - is the only sin left."

- N. T. Wright. The Day The Revolution Began.

Regreting Our God Talk?

"Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God."

- George McDonald

Regreting Our God Talk?

"Many good souls will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God."

- George McDonald

It Is Ordaine That We Should Know One Another

"And I think that life itself, and the way we come into the world, is so ordained by the deity that we should know one another.

For everyone comes into this great universe obscure and unknown casually and by degrees, but when he mixes with his fellows and grows to maturity he shines forth, and becomes well-known instead of obscure, and conspicuous instead of unknown."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals.

1st Century Greek Philosopher

UnRuffled Lives Die

"For Sophocles' words,

"Brightly shines brass in use,

but when unused

It groweth dull in time, and mars the house,"

.... are also appropriate to the character of a man, which gets rusty and senile by not mixing in affairs but living in obscurity. For mute inglorious ease, and a sedentary life devoted to leisure, not only injure the body but also the soul: and as hidden waters overshadowed and stagnant get foul because they have no outlet, so the innate powers of unruffled lives, that neither imbibe nor pass on anything, even if they had any useful element in them once, seem to be effete and wasted."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals

Terror Begets Terror

"Those who would gain power through terror, rule through terror."

- Pierre Elliot Trudeau -

FLQ Terrorist Crisis in Quebec.

200 bombings, 7 murders, 2 kidnappings

Buddhism Has desire

"Buddhism often says humanity needs to eliminate human desire. When in fact that pursuit is the human minds total fixation on the human desire to eliminate desire."

- Paul Axton -

Pride is no cure.

'Pride is the human cure for shame which is no cure at all, because pride comes before shame in the wisdom literature."

- Paul Axton

Thank God For Our Infancy

"I acknowledge Thee, Lord of heaven and earth, and praise Thee for my first rudiments of being, and my infancy, whereof I remember nothing..."

- Augustine -

The Confessions of St. Augustine

A Narrow Soul

"Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that Thou mayest enter in. It is ruinous; repair Thou it."

- Augustine,The Confessions of St. Augustine

We Are The Same As He Is

“No, Lise, it’s not contempt,” Alyosha answered, as though he had prepared himself for the question. “I was thinking of that on the way here. How can it be contempt when we are all like him, when we are all just the same as he is?"

- Fyodor Dostoevshy. The Brothers Karamazov

Analysis From Above

"Isn’t there in all our analysis- I mean your analysis… no, better call it ours- aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor man- in analysing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh?"

- Fyodor Dostoevshy. The Brothers Karamazov

Inebriate My Heart

"Oh! that Thou wouldest enter into my heart, and inebriate it, that I may forget my ills, and embrace Thee, my sole good!"

Paying It All While Exhausting No Resource.

"Thou payest debts,

owing nothing;

remittest debts,

losing nothing."

- Augustine -

"The Confessions of St. Augustine"

No Christian Can Use The Sword?

"No Christian could be a magistrate nor could he use the sword to punish or to kill anyone,

for he had no scripture for such a thing."

- Felix Manz -

(The Anabaptist Story. William R. Estep)

Hate Your Own Sin Not Somebody Elses

"Love the sinner, hate the sin? How about: Love the sinner, hate your own sin! I don't have time to hate your sin. There are too many of you! Hating my sin is a full-time job. How about you hate your sin, I'll hate my sin and let's just love each other!” ~ Mark Lowry

Hate Your Own Sin Not Somebody Elses

"Love the sinner, hate the sin? How about: Love the sinner, hate your own sin! I don't have time to hate your sin. There are too many of you! Hating my sin is a full-time job. How about you hate your sin, I'll hate my sin and let's just love each other!” ~ Mark Lowry

Your Church Looks Exactly The Same

 "Anyway. Sometimes people will ask me about a certain church we went to, and I find myself having to dig pretty hard to pluck the particular church they wanna know about out of the mess of services in my head. -- This is not because I've been to so many churches recently, but because they're almost all exactly the same...like EXACTLY...and they all smoosh together in my mind like peanut butter and jelly on suburban white bread.  

My favorite part of this overarching sameness is how every church is dying for the person walking in on a Sunday morning to think they're different from all the other churches. While they're so similar, it's almost comical."

- Jamie Wright

Trivial Drival Preaching &Teaching Inspires Nothing!

Such a trivial level that we think we have heard it all. I've had leadership say as much. What about Teaching that reminds us every week we have a lifetime of study and learning and we still won't learn it all? Reminds me i have much to more to know and grow into? I remember  leading a group in Charlottetown  about ten-year  ago and a life long church leader at first was very very frustrated and a bit angry. Becuse he was struggling with the material and reading assignments. I did not know why. Then about five nights in he said that he had never heard much of this stuff (i was teaching Kingdom themes) before. He said i read a paragraph and it is so profound that i have to read it over three or four times. It turns out the anger was he was angry he had never been taught this stuff before, and wondered how come at 65 he has not encountered so much of this teaching,and he could have been digging more in these themes. He was convinced at 65, that doing more than the average church member, he had a good handle on most things.  Then he learned themes he did not know existed.  I said i dont know... but we have a lifetime to study and still don't know it all. I said let it wash over you.... just be exposed. 

I love it when secularists talk to me like  they have the church and theology all figured out. Yes.... it happens weekly to me.  They dont ask my opinion, they talk to me to correct me based on their assumptions... they trully do feel they have a good handle on what faith people  think. I dont have conversations there.  Every week  a church should be taken deep enough in some aspect of teaching they can't say "i heard it all before." A good shock as to what they don't know is required very regularly.... or we forget we have something to aspire to.... for a lifetime. 

My 2 cents.

"Even kids at a pretty early age get bored if they are not exposed to maybe things they can't completely apprehend, or things that are in some way held out for them something else to attain. 

But when it is the drivil, and trivia, and game playing that becomes the focus of your activity….  What i see happening among adults with boredom and passing through the back door. Oh they're prepared for that as children.  Because that sort of thin engagement i think ultimately  is not going to, first of all, disciple anyone, and probably won't hold their attention into highschool and beyond.

- Paul Axton

Never Sing A Lesser Piece

"You must not sing the Haters
song," the Father-Spirit cried,
Be very careful, for I love you,
Troubador.

"Now," cried the World Hater,
"Let's do this tune at once.
I'll pipe, you sing. Think of
the thousand kingdoms that will
dance about our feet."

"No, Hater, I'll not sing your melodies,"
the Troubadour replied.

What then Singer will you sing?"

"The Ancient Star-Song of the Father-Spirit."

"Alone, without accompaniment?"

"Yes, Hater, all alone if need be."

"You need my pipe, man."

"You need my song instead."

"The music of your song is far
beyond this tiny pipe."

"Then, go! For I shall never sing
a lesser piece."

- The Singer. Calvin Miller 

Mission Is Standing Close To Evil

Hate sometimes
stands quite
close to love.

God too stands
often near to
evil-like silent
chessmen - side by side.
Only the colour
of the squares
is different."

- Calvin Miller. The singer

When You WILL Be Made To Pay

"She was breathless. She had perhaps intended to express her idea with more dignity, art and naturalness, but her speech was too hurried and crude. It was full of youthful impulsiveness, it betrayed that she was still smarting from yesterday’s insult, and that her pride craved satisfaction."

(About Katerina Ivanovna)

- Fyodor Dostoevshy -

The Brothers Karamazov 

Worship Makes Costly Demands

"In our fallenness we continually turn in upon ourselves to seek fulfilment without self-offering. Worship makes costly demands on our time and energy. It calls us from the inertia of self-centeredness."

- The rule of the Society of St John the Evangelist. 

"Left to our own devices we will develop a comfortable spirituality that fails to challenge us. Perhaps it will be perfectly crafted for our own needs, but leaves out those of others." 
- Debra K. Farrington. Living Faith Day by Day. 

Mankind Will Shake An Unfamiliar Hand, And Find It Wounded

"And those who know the ancient star song
watch with singing for the sign of footprints in the galaxies,
through which the little planet rides
in routine cycles of despair.
But Joy seldom sleeps for long.
And someday, in a lonely moment,mankind will shake an unfamiliar hand,and find it wounded."

- Calvin Miller. The Singer: A Classic Retelling Of Cosmic Conflict

The Gospel of Intellectuals and Farmers

"The fourteenth chapter of the book of Acts puts Paul in Lystra. Now Lystra was an uneducated Agrarian community. And Paul's message was identical there as it was in Athens, but not as labored. He expected uneducated farmers to understand the same message that he expected the Greek intellectuals to understand. Now he didn't say it the same way, but he did say the same message."

- Dr James D. Strauss. 1990. LCS Chapel Service.

Futile Top Dredge the Graveyard For A Messiah

"Habeas Corpusis a weak and futile law. But earthlings never seem to learn that it is futile to dredge the graveyard for a messiah."

-Dr James D. Strauss. LCS Chapel Sermon "1990

You Have No Other Control But Response.

"Audiences do not determine the message.

Only how to respond to it.

But Audiences do not determine the consequences of how they respond to it.

So, the last word is not in an audiences hands.

It's in God's hands."

- Dr. James D. Strause. 1990 LCS Chapel Sermon.

"A vision is too often "done" to institutions by a leader, making it a passive rather than participatory process. In some ways we need to learn how not to have a vision, even to make things purposely vague, which allows everyone space to shape the vision so that they are not being treated as objects......"

- Leonard Sweet. Nudge.

No Vision!

"A denominational executive always asks his clergy, “So, what’s your vision?” When he saw me one day in an elevator, we chatted and sure enough, “So, Sweet, what’s your vision?” I replied, “Sir, I don’t have a vision.” He was incredulous: “What! How can you possibly say that? You must have a vision. Aren’t you one of the church’s visionaries? You‘re a leader, aren’t you?”

“No, Bishop. I’m not a leader. I’m a follower. I’m following a vision, but it’s not my vision. The vision is Jesus. I grew up singing a hymn I take literally: ‘Be Thou My Vision, O Lord of my life.”

- Nudge. Leonard Sweet 

Let's Call Church what Church Is

“Let’s make a pact to use the term church only the way God uses it, not for humanity’s faltering institutions, but for the living, breathing family that thrives in the earth.”

- Kevin Smith

I Don't Know Where the Bulldozer Has Buldozed their Bones

"I am one of the few Holocost surrivers still left......  I am really moved that I have this opportunity to be here (pause), for my family. 

Because i don't know where the wind has blown their ashes. And I don't know where the bulldozer has buldozed their bones."

- Dr. Eva Olsson. 91 year old Holocaust Survivor speaking in Edmonton at the Rememberance Day Ceremonies.

Forbidden To Sew Of Study Law

"The center where they work is named after Amel Zenoune-Zouani, once a twenty-two-year-old law student with the same dreams of a legal career that I had in the nineties. She was killed at a faux barrage outside the town in January 1997 because she refused to abandon her studies. I try to find her family in Sidi Moussa in 2010 but am unable to locate them. I think of Amel Zenoune dead in the street when I look at the covered heads of every one of the teachers today in Sidi Moussa. Her death was meant to make them all obey. But Amel lives on in every small act of female resistance here, like going out to sew when going out to sew is forbidden."

- Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here. 

Busy With Gossip

"Moscow is chiefly busy with gossip," he continued. "Just now they are talking about you and your father.""

- Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace