passion on The Missional Church

I have but one passion: It is He, it is He alone. The world is the field and the field is the world; and henceforth that country shall be my home where I can be most used in winning souls for Christ.

Our mission is the mission of Jesus Christ.  He lived as an ordinary human being. We will care for the common life of humanity. He served men and women. We are committed to working for human wel...

Gracious God, you have called us to be a unified body, working together that which you have willed for the world. In our apathy, we fail to participate in the work you have called us to do. In our div...

Lack of interest in mission is not fundamentally caused by an absence of compassion or commitment, nor by lack of information or exhortation. And lack of interest in mission is not remedied by more sh...

It was this…intention that made the primitive Christians such eminent instances of piety, that made the goodly fellowship of the Saints and all the glorious army of martyrs and confessors. And if you ...

Holy God, You call us to a passionate, all-consuming faith. Yet, so frequently, we give You half-hearted obedience or distracted, leftover moments of our time. You tell us that we are the salt of the ...

When the great theologian Jürgen Moltmann was sixteen years old in 1943, he was drafted into the German army and was soon captured by the Allied forces. He wound up in a prisoner of war camp in Scotla...

O God our Father, who sent your Son to be our Savior: renew in us day by day the power of your Holy Spirit; that with knowledge and passion, with courage and love, with gratitude and hope, we may stri...

In June 2024, I (A. J.) had the opportunity to visit the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, Oregon, to meet with a group of inmates who had read one of my recent books. The experience was...

Just this morning, my family attended church with our son who has autism. He was particularly enthused by the music today, and he was moving around quite a bit. A man in the choir noticed our son, and...

To just read the Bible, attend church, and avoid “big” sins— is this passionate, wholehearted love for God?

Ministers run the awful risk . . . of ceasing to be witnesses to the presence in their own lives — let alone in the lives of the people they are trying to minister to — of a living God who transcends ...

The problem with making your passion the thing that guides you is that passion can trick you into avoiding tasks that maybe aren’t fun but that are absolutely vital to get you to where you need to be....

Lord of all creation, you make us into a new creation, your followers sing new songs of praise to you, and yet we so easily fall into routines as we worship you. Too often we offer you lip service wit...

In the history of the Christian church, the tendency has been to evade being identified with the sufferings of Jesus Christ; [people] have sought to procure the carrying out of God’s order by a shortc...

Mount Calvary is the academy of love.

Preaching Commentary What is “Good” about Friday? For the work-a-day world in the United States of America, Fridays are good. TGIF, “Thank God It’s Friday!” is an interjection we use to convey reli...

Preparation Depending on which parts of the service you will incorporate, you will want to gather the following materials. A wooden cross, paper, pen, nails, and a hammer (or pushpins). Eno...

Lord God, forgive us for how we have let our faith atrophy. We grow complacent, stagnant, and we fail to strive to follow you. Give us passion, give us courage, and give us motivation to excel for you...

Loving, good, and kind God, you sent your Son to endure the cross so that we might know you. You desire a relationship with us, and you are interested in the condition of our hearts. Too often our hea...

Pastor: The grace of our Lord + Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. People: Amen. Pastor: Blessed is He who comes in the name of th...

The early church fathers named the primary sin patterns “passions,” borrowing a Latin term that could also be translated “sufferings ” As we live out a unique pattern or “face” of sin, we begin to thi...

Pastor: Let us pray for the whole people of God in Christ Jesus and for everyone according to their needs. Holy Lord, all glory and praise are offered to You, for You are our Redeemer and King, o...

The story of Passion-Tide and Easter is the story of the winning of that freedom and of that victory over the evils of Time. The burden of the guilt is accepted (“He was made Sin”), the last agony of ...

The missionary doctor Albert Schweitzer wrote in his memoir, “In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should...

God of justice, you repeatedly call us to action, but we so often fail to respond. Your word convicts us, demonstrating that inaction is just as sinful as the wrong actions. Lord of mercy, forgive us ...

Preaching Commentary Introduction The lectionary text from John is an exceedingly long passage, but covers the main events that we commemorate on Good Friday. For that reason, I am going to break u...

The Passion of the Christ opened up on Ash Wednesday, had a Good Friday.

I recently had lunch with a former British boarding school chaplain. He remembers being with the boys in his school the morning thirty years ago that the very first pictures of widespread starvation i...

Amazed, bewildered, they are gathered around him, whose pondered resolution comes to rest, withdrawing him from all the ties that bound him--a stranger gliding by with thoughts unguessed. He feels tha...