church on Deconstruction

[R]eliable quantitative research around this has brought some helpful insights to light. Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge have released the largest study ever done on dechurching in America i...

In this short (and humorous) excerpt, author David Zahl shares a definition of the secular: Perhaps secular warrants its own explanation, though. My most immediate association comes from the belov...

On this interpretation of the work of Christ (sc. the Pauline doctrine of reconciliation) the whole Church rests. If you move faith from that centre, you have driven the nail into the Church’s coffin....

The disastrous and widening cleavage between the Church and the Arts on the one hand and between the State and the Arts on the other leaves the common man with the impression that the artist is someth...

He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.

Today, much of the church has gone in for theatrics, running a showboat instead of a lifeboat; staging a performance instead of living an experience; having a “form of godliness without the power ther...

The Latin term for confrontation means “to turn your face toward, to look at frontally.” It merely indicates that you are turning toward the relationship and the person. You are face-to-face, so to sp...

Even though it’s now associated with him, Nietzsche didn’t coin the phrase God is dead. As the son of a Lutheran pastor, he would have heard that line in a Lutheran Holy Saturday hymn. And although...

A Game of "Who's the Best Preacher?" What is preached matters far more than how it is preached or who preaches it. In Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, he addresses a troubl...

A Game of "Who's the Best Preacher?" What is preached matters far more than how it is preached or who preaches it. In Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, he addresses a troubl...

When I think of masterpieces, I think of art. But what is art? I like the way that Thomas Hoving, who was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, put it: “Art happens when anyon...

We structure our churches and maintain them so as to shield us from God and to protect us from genuine religious experience…The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions...

The foundation of all reality, the imaginable source of everything that is, is not just a monolithic “T”, ‘but also a remarkably mutual we,’ a communion of distinct persons supremely united in persona...

There Are No Ordinary Things J. R. R. Tolkien tells a short story about an ordinary fellow who just wants to finish a painting. Over time, he is constantly distracted by the requests of his neighbors...

Maltbie D. Babcock, author of This Is My Father’s World and a Presbyterian pastor in Brooklyn, introduced a free pew system in his church, upsetting a wealthy woman who found strangers in her us...

Before Christians can say things about what the church ought to be, their first need is to say what the Church is, here and now amid its own failures and the questionings of the bewildered. Looking at...

The church is a community that exists because something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God’s truth and mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, ...

Edward T. Hall likened the effects of culture to an iceberg. Some aspects of a culture are overt, in clear view above the waterline, so to speak. But most are hidden deep below the surface, forming th...

In this short excerpt, the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass describes the tension between faith in Christ and faith in a form of Christianity willing to enslave an entire race of peopl...

When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom.

Jesus You are our peace You proclaim it You create it You bring us near Without you there is No safety No belonging No nurturing No identity rooted beyond this dust Without you we are Anchorless St...

The problem is not recognizing the importance of the individual. The problem is the glorification of the individual. When the individual self is glorified over the greater good of the community, right...

Hold firmly that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this, and you dissolve the unity of the Church.

There's a humorous, apocryphal story about a man standing by a river. On the opposite bank, a woman calls out, "How do I get to the other side of the river?" The man replies, "YOU A...

We have the same biblical texts that earlier generations of Christians thought their way through, of course, but our reflections are shaped by six unique factors. (1) Especially in the Anglo-Saxon wo...

As the broken bread, once scattered upon the mountains, has been gathered together and made one, so may your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into one kingdom; To God be the gl...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Corinth: "Young, Scrappy, and Hungry" Corinth was an up-and-coming city with an up-and-coming attitude. The Romans had conque...

While I don’t agree with late professor and scholar Marcus Borg on significant theological positions, I appreciate how he described the context surrounding Jesus’ new paradigm of kingdom living: In hi...

A friend of mine, lecturing in a theological college in Kenya, introduced his students to “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” This, he said, was a movement of thought and scholarship that in its ear...