As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, “the ‘weightlessness’ of contemporary belief in God is a reality…for religious liberals and many evangelicals.

To live [in the church] at the beck and call of marketing logic is to live in slavery.

As is typical of this God [of Israel], he calls his people into freedom in the most unlikely place.

The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality…The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy...

God’s love for us is uncoerced and so freely given that it does not demand a response. But so freely is it given that it creates freedom in the recipient, so that our response is...

The Good News does not hinge on words like do or change but on the powerless, irrelevant, and frightening words like belief and faith.

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” says Paul. And we are most in line with the Spirit, most faithfully obedient, when instead of trying to manipulate people into faith, we simply...

[denial] is an attempt to bring order to our lives.

The wealthy, Jesus says, can only get into heaven through the eye of a needle; the same applies to churches wealthy in numbers and programs.

We say we long for intimacy with God and others, and yet we structure our lives so that this becomes impossible. One might think we are avoiding intimacy, that maybe we really like our finely...

The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don’t have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed...

The Christian life does not just evolve. It also requires specific decisions and public commitments to deepen our faith and obedience.

I sometimes wonder if God calls us into the church because it represents not the people of God at their best but us at our worst. I wonder if he calls us to become embedded...

To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it.

Only unconditional grace can transform a hardened heart into a grateful heart. Only a free gift can demolish any notion of quid pro quo. Only an utterly merciful act of love can fashion a new...

For his own unfathomable reasons, God chooses to disguise himself when he comes to this planet, and there have been few disguises better than the church.

If the church is the body of Christ [who was disguised in servant form], why would we think the world would be able to pick us out of a crowd of other well-meaning organizations?

To paraphrase Paul, God often uses the cheesy to confound the sophisticated. He regularly honors those who are confused about his leading as if they have nailed it.

I sometimes wonder whether our churches–living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses–are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.