relationships and community on Cross-Cultural Experience

[Speaking of the early church] A cosmopolitan spirit grew, particularly in the cities, that transcended national barriers. Old tribal distinctions and identities were breaking down, leaving people rip...

A missionary family who has started organic churches in some of the most dangerous fields in the world once returned to the states for furlough. On the first Sunday back, they visited a large Baptist ...

It is a phone call no parent wants to receive. “Jerry,” Bethany said, “Catherine’s had a little accident.” “Accident! How bad?” “She’s going to be okay. You want to talk to her? We’re in a kind of am...

Belonging can be such a fickle and painful process in life. As the popular researcher and writer Brené Brown describes in her book, Braving the Wilderness, she struggled to fit in after moving to New ...

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...

The vision that Jesus gives us is this: That I am unconditionally loved, that I belong to God, and that I am a person who can really trust that. When I meet another person who also is rooted in the he...

Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.

The United States retains a basic respect for religion though it may be following European trends: surveys show a steady rise in the “nones” (now one-third of those under the age of thirty), that is, ...

What I’ve come to realize is if I really want to “meet Jesus,” then I have to get a lot closer to the people He created. All of them, not just some of them.

We cannot be closed off to one another and be open to God. That’s not how this works. Do you remember the commercial when the woman says “that’s not how this works, that's not how any of this work...

Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. A...

“I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

As you go forth from this place, may you have the courage to confront the dark places. May you trust in God’s goodness to lead you to the living water. May you act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly ...

He drew a circle that shut me out— Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in!

Love cures people: the ones who receive love and the ones who give it, too.

Let me tell you the story of a great missionary named Frank C. Laubach (1884–1970). He grew up in the farming community of Benton, PA, and served as a Congregationalist missionary in the Philippines. ...

Here’s a testimony from Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel: Harper grew up as a child of a single mother. After her parents divorced, she and her mother moved from Philadelphia where ...

Alexander Schmemann, the late priest who led a reform movement in Russian Orthodoxy, tells of a time when he was traveling on the subway in Paris, France, with his fiancée. At one stop an old and ugly...

In these acts of love Jesus created a scandal for devout, religious Palestinian Jews. The absolutely unpardonable thing was not his concern for the sick, the cripples, the lepers, the possessed . . . ...

Why did it disturb the religious leaders that Jesus ate with “sinners”? To eat with someone is an important symbol of fellowship. And in those days, the Jews had a rule: one is not to have such fellow...

What we choose to love is very important for what we love leads our eyes, ears, and hearts on a pilgrimage that shapes the texture of our lives.

Should anyone knock at my heart and say, “Who Lives here? I should reply, “Not Martin Luther, but the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Loving and faithful God, You save and sustain us. What marvelous good news You give us through Jesus!Yet we are oblivious to opportunities to share Your grace and love. We fail to see, as Your Word sa...

The question of performance-free love transcends ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status. “Am I forever loved for who I am? Is the background elevator music to our hearts.

On a cold January day, a forty-three-year-old man was sworn in as the chief executive of his country. By his side stood his predecessor, a famous general who, fifteen years earlier, had commanded his ...

“Dear friends, Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God…. This is love: Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his So...

The fact that our works are done in the service of God is not enough, by itself, to prevent us from losing our interior life if we let them devour all our time and all our strength. Work is good and n...

“Most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love,” writes John Steinbeck in East of Eden, a book full of characters who crave the love of a father, a brother, a lover, a son. The experience of fu...

To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then, and be “safe”?

It’s difficult for people to love the real you when you are covering up who you really are. We connect with others when we take our mask off and let others in.