If God is the object of worship, then worship must proceed from me, the subject, to God, who is the object. . . . If God is understood, however, as the personal God who acts as subject in the world and in worship rather that the remote God who sits in the heavens, then worship...Read More
Me-oriented worship is the result of a culturally driven worship. When worship is situated in the culture and not in the story of God, worship becomes focused on the self. It becomes narcissistic. . . . Much of our worship has shifted from a focus on God and God’s story to a focus on me...Read More
The church needs to be realigned to the intent of Christ, but it does not need to be reinvented. Reinventing the church is what we do when we allow the culture to shape the church. . . . Obviously the church must speak to the culture. It only speaks authentically and with integrity, however, when...Read More
Consumers want programs. . . . But nowhere in the Epistles do you find the apostolic writers urging the church to develop programs. Instead all the teaching is about a way of life, and that way of life is taught and caught in the church as it sees itself as the continuation of God’s story...Read More
The church is to be a countercultural community. . . . God has raised up a people in a fallen culture to be a showcase of his desire for humanity—a people living in union with his purposes and in praise of his glory. . . . The church is to live out the new humanity...Read More
There is a need to rediscover the very nature of the church as the continuation of the presence of God in the world. Reclaiming the incarnate nature of the church will shift us away from the business model of the church and help us focus on the church as the continuation of God’s vision for...Read More
I urge us all to stop looking at ourselves for the nourishment of our own spirituality and turn to the church and its worship to disclose God’s embrace and thus nourish our spirituality. The church, by its very existence, is the life of God’s embrace, and worship, when properly understood, is the continual experience of...Read More
The current crisis of the church is that many define it out of the world’s narrative. In recent years the church has become a business, with Jesus as the commodity to be marketed and advertised. . . . While [this approach] has resulted in numbers, it struggles to form depth. . . . Churches formed...Read More
When we situate spirituality in ourselves and not God’s divine embrace, we feel responsible to nourish our own spirituality. . . . When we situate spirituality in God’s embrace, the church and its worship are seen as sources that nourish the spiritual life, not by what the church and its worship demand of us but...Read More
We are not spiritual because we practice the disciplines or use pious words but because we are united to Jesus who has restored our union with God. So our goal is never to become spiritual but to live out the spirituality we have in Jesus through the choices that spring forth from continually living in...Read More
Christ is the embodied story of God, the one in whom God became human and showed us what humanity was intended to be. The faithful life is the life that seeks to live the Jesus way. The vow of fidelity means you can count on me to be Jesus to you. And when I fail,...Read More
Rebellion against God has always taken the form of self-love and self-interest. . . . When we live in the pattern of self-interest, very little thought is given to living in the pattern of death and resurrection. The self-love of narcissism is one of the greatest problems we face today. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine...Read More
Here is the deep rhythm of the spiritual life: a baptism into death to sin and resurrection to a new life made possible only by the divine embrace of God, who in his incarnation became one of us to take into himself the curse of sin and death on the hard wood of the cross...Read More
Baptism reveals the daily pattern of the spiritual life. . . . Our day-to-day, moment by moment experience of life in all the spiritual expressions of the embodied life . . . is not something we do as a matter of course. Baptism is instead a life-changing covenant, a call to live deeply into the...Read More
Jesus chose by his own will to embody God’s original intent for humanity. . . . The ancient church affirmed that Jesus, by the complete and constant surrendering of his human will reversed our fallen human will, achieved union with God for us all, and left us an example to follow. . . . Because...Read More
