The box of Amish life and culture might provide some protection, but it could never bring salvation.

The idea of a personal God who protects us, loves us, and then punishes us by not allowing us into Heaven, but instead casts us into Hell for eternity if we haven’t met his standards...

When I cannot read, when I cannot think, when I cannot even pray, I can trust.

You didn’t learn the Bible as a Fundamentalist. You learned fragments of Old Testament legalism mixed with Behaviorism & Nietzschean ethics

Worship, then, needs to be characterized by hospitality; it needs to be inviting. But at the same time, it should be inviting seekers into the church and its unique story and language. Worship should be...

I realized that most times it’s not the big things along my spiritual journey that tempt me to get off track. It’s a culmination of small daily aggravations I know God could fix but doesn’t....

The overriding reason why we should take other people’s cultures seriously is because God has taken ours seriously.

Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally; you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last. This is why many in this age (and in every...

This is my life.This is my calling.

Lord grant me a humble spirit and a willing heart.

No matter what kind of sin you have committed, there is always forgiveness. You must repent and seek for forgiveness. You can walk in the new life and light.

We are half mechanical [physical] and half mysterious [spiritual]; to live in either domain and ignore the other is to be fools or fanatics… We have to WORK OUT in the mechanical realm what God...

Our faith gathers and slings together all the best and most altruistic principles into one set, utterly perfect in measure, and utterly potent in it’s defiance to the wickedness of this world.

Was Jesus a christian?

The Word of God is your best defence against the troubles of this world.

Should we tolerate the blatant incorrectness of religion? Tolerating ignorance, superstition and stupidity will not provide for a healthy advancement of our society. Religion is cancer for modern thought, rationality, and even common sense.

You will find what you are looking for when you realize God has placed those longings in your heart as a divine desire; your hunger is a gift from God to draw you to Him....

The sinless One took on the face of a sinner so that we sinners could take on the face of a saint.

…pero sé que hay hombres buenos y malos, y que estos reflejan en su dios, predicando falsamente en su nombre, sus propias miserias.

He had forgotten that God saw through the silk robes to the sinful heart, that the only wealth worth having was treasure in heaven, and that even the king had to kneel down in church....

while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.

Nismo li možda tijekom vremena tumačili kršćanstvo suviše isključivo kao religiju osjetljivu za grijeh te u skladu s tim premalo osjetljivu za trpljenje?

People from my first home say I’m brave. They tell me I’m strong. They pat me on the back and say, ‘Way to go. Good job.’ But the truth is, I am not really very...

On the other hand, inspiration – a criterion for canonization we might expect to play a great role – is not a factor. The Shepherd of Hermas and many writings either claimed inspiration or had...

cosmopolitan theology that longs for the Kindom of God seeks to recover its revolutionary universalizing ethos in terms of hospitality, neighbor-love, and multiple solidarities that one can see in Jesus’ teaching and ministry, without any...

The only way to joy is to interpret our circumstances by God’s Word rather than to judge God by our circumstances.

This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.

It is a tragic and agonizing irony that instructions once delivered for the purpose of avoiding needless offense are now invoked in ways that needlessly offend, that words once meant to help draw people to...

I know two kinds of Christians, those that love and those that love to be right.

circumcision,” and Paul’s defense of the adequacy of trust/faith can come into its own again. The Galatian situation is never far; in fact, it is all too familiar.

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing...

You can never please everybody, don’t even try.

We are usually angered when someone insults us, until Divine Grace comes upon us. When we receive Grace, we no longer feel hurt when others insult us but remain quiet and peaceful, as though the...

Good soldiers know that if they don’t recognize who their enemy is, they are destined to lose the war. That is also true for those of us who battle in God’s army. Even though Jesus...

Cherie.

When we have an out-of-control appetite for food, it signals that we have put that appetite above its rightful place as a necessary and God-given function.

Get plugged in at your church. Find a way to invest yourself. Let’s change the church’s problem from ‘Where do we find the help we need?’ to ‘What do we do with all the help...

The profundity of Christianity is that Christ is both our redeemer and our judge, not that one is our redeemer and another is our judge, for then we certainly come under judgement, but that the...

Want to keep Christ in Christmas? Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the guilty, welcome the unwanted, care for the ill, love your enemies, and do unto others as you would have done unto...

You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything,...

Keep focusing on God and all things will work out.

of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.

It is this – that everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That’s what I want to say. Don’t you forget that. Whatever happens, don’t you dare let yourself forget.

[The devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs–pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies...

For better of for worse the church in the West bought modernity’s claims. We were baptized in its story (even though it said it did not have one) and accepted its categories and definitions. But...

But, of course, what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word INTERFERENCE. But Christianity placed at...

I couldn’t get Him out of my head. Still can’t. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about...

In the afternoon the digestion of the meal deprives me of the incomparable lightness which characterizes the fast days.

God’s people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a...

The God I serve is able to save us both. To give us the winning lottery ticket so all our money problems will go away. To mend our broken hearts. To bring us close to...