Isaiah 29:13–16 (NRSV) The Lord said: “Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote; so I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing. The...
Today, we have access to more resources than ever before. The internet, an information superhighway, serves as a vast repository of encyclopedic knowledge, accessible from almost any location at any time. This unprecedented abundance prompts an important question: What have we achieved with all this...
Throughout The Ministry Collaborative’s decade-plus work alongside clergy in Scotland, we were fortunate to be guided by and learn from two gifted pastors, Arthur Christie and Peter Neilson. In recent correspondence with Peter, he shared the following reflection. What I have learned most in our...
“The Quiet Revival” - a survey conducted in the UK by YouGov on behalf of The Bible Society UK - claims, “Church attendance [in England and Wales] has risen by 50 per cent over the last six years, busting the myth of church decline.” Moreover,...
“When God made His promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for Him to swear by, He swore by himself, saying, ‘I will surely bless you and give you many descendants.’ And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised. People swear by...
Twenty-five years ago, Zygmunt Bauman coined Liquid Modernity to describe a world where “forms of social life cannot keep their shape for long, because they decompose and melt faster than the time it takes to cast them.” That liquid has since thinned and accelerated. In...
In times like these, when lines have been drawn and trenches have been dug between ‘us and them,’ it can be difficult to imagine that we are not alone in our struggles. If we’ve ever been hurt or abandoned by friends or family, the hurdle...
There is always a cost to belonging, even when there is no membership fee to join. Every community, institution, and organization has their own ethos, expectations, and/or rules of engagement, which are often unstated yet can be as binding as the written rules. I went...
Seth Godin often asks: Are we connecting the dots, or merely collecting them? In that spirit, I want to connect a few seemingly diverse—but profoundly related—observations about the church today. * * * * * A recent article in The Economist began: Push open the heavy door and...