relationships and community on Boundaries

The absence of boundaries creates nonorder, and nonorder is not the end of exclusion but the end of life.

When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice.

Even with the desire for a better life, we can be reluctant to do the work of boundaries because it will be a war. The battle falls into two categories: outside resistance we get from others and the r...

Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst crisis. It is the internal capacity to ...

In his highly book, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the importance of finding balance, even as life seems to pull us in different directions: Overextending yourself is stretching your physic...

I was recently brought in to talk with a group of corporate leaders who were trying to manage a difficult reorganization in their company. One of the project managers told me that, after listening to ...

It’s important to note that God does not obliterate the darkness; rather, God names it and limits it—puts boundaries on it. The boundary is the light.

God built into the creation a variety of cultural spheres, such as the family, economics, politics, art, and intellectual inquiry. Each of these spheres has its own proper "business" and nee...

When conflict and division are driving both politics and media (including social media), the contrast between the way of the world and the way of Jesus stands out more than ever. How can pastors, task...

Too Busy for God? American work culture is all-pervasive. For many members of your congregation, it can be a real fight to get actual time off—and cell phones and the internet has made it possible to...

We didn’t have a lot of rules [at the food pantry at St. Gregory, an Episcopal congregation in San Francisco]. You could be a drunk or junkie, but you couldn’t volunteer if you were high. You couldn’t...

Perhaps there is no object more desired than a house in America. Meghan Daum writes in her hilarious and poignant book Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, “There is no object of desire qui...

James Brownson describes what he calls a “missional hermeneutic” as observed throughout the New Testament: I call the model I am developing a missional hermeneutic because it springs from a basic obs...

In 1970 John Perkins, an African American pastor and community organizer who lived on “the black side” of rural Mendenhall, Mississippi, was nearly beaten to death by white state police officers. The ...

“Obedience” is not in favor today. American culture prizes everything that is rebellious, “edgy,” and—a favorite word of the cultural elite — “transgressive.” Staying within boundaries is nerdy; pushi...

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is ...

There’s a wonderful scene in The Grapes of Wrath, where Tom Joad says a final good-bye to his mother and assures her that his presence transcends physical boundaries—even when she can’t see him: W...

We build too many walls and not enough bridges.

The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor…Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are the...

To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.

Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...

Never in history has distance meant less. . . . Figuratively we “use up” places and dispose of them much in the same way we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the...

There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokenness we find within. Moving apprehensively into the desert's emptiness, up the mo...

Maleness and femaleness is the fundamental way we carry our relational design. Interestingly, the English word sexuality comes from the Latin word sexus, which means “being divided, cut off, separated...

Most of us need this type of push to help us start the [reconciliation] journey. We need someone or something to push us out of our comfort zones and the isolated social enclaves that keep us alienate...

There are walls that need to come down. You can pray unity but then you have to work unity by demonstrating what unity really looks like.

One of the dangers of living in a constant state of distraction is that we never go to the bottom of our pain, our sadness, our emptiness, which means we never find that rock-bottom place of the peace...

Differences simply act as a yarn of curiosity unraveling until we get to the other side.

Relationships are a large playing field upon which other life contests and struggles get worked out.