America Is Not the Future of the Church
As Evans quotes G.K. Chesterton, “Christianity has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
The church may be “dying” here, but from the Amazon to the Sahara to the Ganges, it is very far from dead.
A Biblical Argument (Sort of) in Opposition to the Bible as Tennessee’s State Book
Christians who get themselves in positions of governing power, and then start pulling such stunts, become an affront to Christianity. It damages the name of Christianity. It wastes time and energy. It unnecessarily offends. If you feel so obligated to offend in the name of Christianity, please offend us by praying for your enemies, seeking good for those who do ill to you, forgiving seventy times seven, giving to any who ask of you, turning the other cheek, and caring for the poor, marginalized, and ostracized, all that radical stuff that is actually in the Bible.
I’m Kimmy Schmidt, Minus the ‘Unbreakable’
It was so hard for me to understand my own feelings that when I watched Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt I hollered with laughter when Kimmy’s bunker-mate said: “Yeah, I’m doing good. Sometimes I get mad for no reason. Like the other day I smashed one of those Kia Sorrentos.” Yep. That is so life after a cult. You’re alive, you’re okay—maybe—but then you have these inexplicable bouts of severe negativity, and you don’t know why. It took me two years unpredictable, unwieldy emotions before I asked for help in therapy.
The church in our day is known for many things; some great, some laughable, and some embarrassing. But what will our individual local churches be known for?
Slick services? Music cranked to eleven? Disney-fried children’s ministries? It’s easy for a church to become known for a product, but we are more often known for the people—the actual church. What will the living and breathing church, not the commodities we produce, but the people that fill the pews, what will we be know for?
We will be known for being mean, angry, and “get off my lawn” kind of people? Are we perceived as gossipy, grudge-holding, hypercritical holier-than-thous? Our doctrine matters, and so does our doctrine in animation—in life and in the culture of our churches.
We ought to be known for being holy people.
How Shauna Niequist helps Christians turn kitchen tables into sacred spaces
The second is that food is a symbol for the whole material, tactile, messy, loud, smelly world God made. I love this world. I love the sounds and smells and textures, and they seem to me to be just as divine as the ideas and beliefs we hold about God. A lot of modern Christianity is about your head—right beliefs that don’t engage our senses or connect us to the world God made. Food gets us back to caring about material, tactile life, not just brains and ideas.
Quitting jobs the minute they get challenging or boring doesn’t lead anywhere. And here’s a sobering thought I waited to say until after I had wooed you with unicorn jokes: Every job has boring parts.
It’s true. There’s no such thing as a perfect job where you just sit around all day watching entire seasons of shows on Netflix and eating bottomless bowls of queso. (That’s not your dream job? Fine, we’re different.)
What if, regardless of the job you have right this second, there was a way to enjoy it more?
No Cigar: Obama’s Cuba Critics Are Dead Wrong
The adoption of a new approach is long overdue. Washington’s current strategy has been in place for some fifty-five years, yet it has spectacularly failed to achieve its objective of bringing down Cuba’s communist government. One wonders what the proponents of staying the course hope to accomplish. Do they believe that the fifty-sixth year—or the maybe the sixtieth or eightieth year—will be the charm? At some point, persisting in a policy that is clearly not working constitutes nothing more than being obstinate. We reached that point in our Cuba policy several decades ago.
Parrot’s Cries of ‘Help, Fire’ Bring Firefighters to Burning House in Idaho
“Once the captain did his walk-around, he could hear something or someone inside yelling, ‘help, fire, help, fire,'” Islas said. Crews went into “rescue mode” and called for backup, thinking that the calls for help were coming from an elderly female, Islas said.
When firefighters couldn’t find anyone in the house, they started using thermal imagery technology, which detected no people, but rather, a parrot sitting on a table, Islas said.