worldview and perspective on Invitation

Father God–You invite us to come as a child to his/her daddy. You invite us to open our souls to You. You invite us to lay our desires before You. You are fond of us, Your children–so we come to You h...

Faithful God, our Father, Lord and Counselor: By your grace you know our names before we are even born. By your grace you call us your own sons and daughters. By your grace you give us an eternal purp...

It was a cold December weekend in Chicago, and I was excited. One of my best friends was getting married, and to top it off, he had asked me to officiate the wedding. I was honored by the invitation, ...

The essence of temptation is the invitation to live independently of God.

In her book Invitation to Retreat , Ruth Haley Barton shares some of the many insights she has had since she began intentionally taking inattentional retreats to re-connect with God and her own d...

The following article was originally written for the author’s denominational newsletter as part of the celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. It is meant to provide some insights into t...

Before he was a household name, C. S. Lewis was a hardened atheist. From his teens to his early thirties, he vocalized many of the objections to Christianity that animate doubt in our age. After his s...

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...

Kate's Crisis: Values vs. Church One damp afternoon during the fall of 2016 I was sharing a pastoral conversation with Kate, a professional artist in her late 20s. Over years of meals and convers...

Mark Twain’s travels through Europe became something of a triumphal tour, with the most distinguished figures on the continent eager to host him. He dined with royalty, intellectuals, and statesmen, h...

New Testament Mountains Like the Old Testament, the New Testament has plenty of references to mountains.  There’s the Sermon on the Mount, obviously.  Jesus often went onto hills or mountains to pray...

The Jews were not the only religious people in the ancient world. There were others, such as the Akkadians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, and they had their own creation stories. When one compares the ...

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 ...

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

The day of Jesus’s return will be a wedding feast—and Christians are invited to it not as guests, but as a bride. None of us will have to sneak into heaven through the back door—we’ll be walking up th...

We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our li...

Lord, we come before you this day as part of the human family. Inspire us, O God; open our hearts. We come in our diversity to catch your vision of unity. Inspire us, O God; open our eyes. We ...

Lord, you came to dwell among us, yet we did not recognize you. We still fail to recognize you. You show up in unexpected places and through unexpected people. We fail to see you in the people who are...

We may say that in the possession of the Spirit we who are in Christ have a foretaste of the blessings of the age to come, and a pledge and guarantee of the resurrection of the body. Yet we have only ...

I had a memorable lunch a few years ago with my friends Mike and Claudia, who had recently returned from Malawi, a small country in southeastern Africa. We were sitting in a booth at one of those chai...

You cannot expect people to seriously consider your idea without accepting the possibility that they will challenge it. Accepting that process of engagement as the terrain of leadership liberates you ...

We need to admit the mind into Christian fellowship again. We need the mind disciplined in Christ, enlightened by faith, passionate for God and his creation, to be let loose in the world.

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.

Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this.

Leader: Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, All: by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, t...

Advent means “coming,” from the Latin word adventus, and demarks a season of expectantly preparing to celebrate the first coming of Jesus, while eagerly awaiting His second coming to establish His kin...

It would have been sad for me to spend my life just trying to superimpose stuff on people rather than trying to encourage them to look within themselves for what's of value.

Having therefore, brothers, boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh, and ha...

Lord Jesus–You’ve come, are coming and will come again. Whether we know it or not, we live on the edge of Your advent every moment of every day either with anticipation or with anxiety. As if stumblin...

Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.