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Posts from the ‘Discipleship’ Category

Jan 31

51 Comments

Bonhoeffer: Book Review

Four years ago, as I was nearing the completion of my coursework at Regent College, I somewhat naively signed up for a seminar on the life and thought of German pastor/theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. My only exposure to him to that point had been his famous book The Cost of Discipleship (a book whose title in German, I would soon discover was simply Nachfolge, or Discipleship. The change has been made in Augsburg Fortress’s republishing of the definitive collection of Bonhoeffer’s works). I had read this book in my early twenties, but my recollection of its themes was unimpressive, to put it mildly. Read more

Jan 23

6 Comments

Rich Toward God

Our text for the sermon in church this morning was Luke 12:13-21 (“The Parable of the Rich Fool”). One of the verses in this passage has me thinking this evening. In verse 21, after condemning as folly a life of hoarding possessions, Jesus offers a typically elusive phrase: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” So what does it mean to be “rich toward God?” Read more

Jan 19

32 Comments

Thank God for the Light

Last Thursday afternoon was an afternoon like many others, for me. The workday was winding down; I was cleaning up a few loose ends before heading home to take my daughter to the pool for swim club. In many ways, it had been a good afternoon—nice and quiet, mostly uninterrupted, and ideal for sermon writing and reflection. Read more

Jan 14

4 Comments

Why Jesus?

Yesterday was one of those happy days when a little brown box full of books shows up on my doorstep, and I had just enough time to grab one of them as I ran out the door with my daughter to swimming lessons.  Twenty minutes later, after collapsing poolside nearing the end of what felt like a long day, I read these words that open William Willimon’s Why Jesus?: Read more

Jan 11

13 Comments

The Church, It is a-Changing

At any given time, I have between 25-30 unpublished, half/barely-started posts or links to interesting articles occupying space in my “drafts” folder. Needless to say, things can get buried pretty easily, so I try to periodically root through this folder to see what I once thought was interesting/worth posting on, and to determine what might need to see the light of day (or be consigned to the cyber-scrap heap!). Read more

Jan 5

15 Comments

A Personal Response

While I’m still in the reflection mode occasioned by a new year and a trip through my journals, I’ve been thumbing through a few of the books that I was reading and reflecting upon in my younger years.  Lesslie Newbigin was a writer and a thinker that was immensely helpful to me as I was beginning to negotiate such themes as the uniqueness of Christianity, the nature and limits of reason and faith, and the shape of discipleship.  Newbigin’s books were a gift then, and they remain so today. Read more

Jan 2

6 Comments

A Subtle Mercy

Yesterday was a quiet day at home and my wife was doing some sorting and cleaning around the house.  Around mid-afternoon, she emerged from one room with a large stack of papers and presented them to me with a little smile on her face.  I looked at the first page on the stack and knew why she was smiling.  The pile of paper was a prayer journal that I had kept during my mid twenties.  During this apparently pious (and prolific!) period of my life, I journaled nearly every day, filling a number of thick notebooks with my religious musings, longings, entreaties, and expressions of thanks. Read more

Dec 14

17 Comments

Confession

A post by Andrew Stephens-Rennie over at Empire Remixed has got me thinking about confession. My sense is that confession is seen as something of a dirty word in our culture, conjuring up all kinds of unpleasant images of nosy priests and slavish religious rituals meant to assuage unnecessary guilt. Confession isn’t a popular concept in a self-obsessed culture suspicious of religious power and those who wield it and where we seem to almost instinctively think of ourselves as victims of the myriad forces that act upon us rather than active and willful contributors to the brokenness of our world. Read more

Nov 1

12 Comments

The Gospel According to Who?

As far as ambitiously titled books go, Chris Seay’s The Gospel According to Jesus would surely rank near the top of many lists.  I wasn’t even sure who Seay was when I cracked open the book (turns out he is the pastor of a church called Ecclesia in Houston, TX), but the title grabbed my attention.  I was curious to hear more about the “Faith that Restores All Things,” suggested by the subtitle.  As a Mennonite, I suppose I am drawn to anything that smacks of a Jesus-centred approach to faith.  Consequently, despite my unfamiliarity with the author, I had high hopes for this book. Read more

Oct 22

94 Comments

I’ll Have Some Charity Please

One of the things WordPress’s comprehensive stats page gives navel-gazing blogger-types like myself the opportunity to do is observe as certain “milestones” come and go in the life of their blog. Recently, the 4000th comment came through here, and I am coming up on 400 posts in the nearly four years I have spent in the blogging world. This may be a testimony to my stubbornness and persistence (or egotism!) more than anything else, but it’s still kind of neat to track how this forum has evolved over its lifespan. Read more

Sep 14

A Thousand Glad Answers

It’s been a while since Walter Brueggemann made an appearance around here, so I thought I would share another one of his prayers as I sit down to begin another work week.  I came across this prayer from Prayers for a Privileged People during last week’s service preparations.  Among other things, it seems to me a good reminder of the continual process of disorientation and reorientation that is inherent in the life of faith: Read more

Sep 11

5 Comments

Listening for Life

Of the many things back to school week represents a return to, more regular breakfasts with the kids is among them.  Yesterday morning, the kids were poring over a calendar that mom had laid out on the table in an attempt to get our fall schedule coordinated as a family.  Aside from the events that happen to pertain to them, the kids have always taken an interest in the various holidays that show up on the calendar. Read more

Aug 30

Jesus is the Answer

There is a sign at a local church that I pass by regularly that says this: Jesus is right for what is wrong in your life. For whatever reason, I almost always have a negative response to these kinds of church signs. They strike me as theologically naive and simplistic. I instantly think of a number of smart-alecky type responses that I could supply, thus demonstrating my obvious theological acumen and sophistication. Even though if pressed and given the opportunity to explain and qualify sufficiently, I would affirm the message of the sign, my initial reaction to “Jesus is the answer” type signs is almost always negative. Read more

Aug 25

8 Comments

Informationism

A lot of my reading for this week’s sermon has been focused on Sabbath—how to keep it, why it ought to be kept, what prevents us from keeping it, etc.  Whatever else a consistent and deliberate observation of Sabbath might protect us from, I think that our societal addiction/enslavement to technology would be high on the list.  A couple of articles I’ve come across over the last few days from the New York Times’s “Your Brain on Computers” series (see here and here, for example) have simply reinforced my sense that one of the things that the inhabitant of twenty-first century postmodernity is most desperately in need of is unplugging. Read more

Aug 17

5 Comments

Something Stronger

Ordinarily, I am entrusted with the task  of preaching once per month but because of summer holidays and staff vacations I find myself in middle of preparing three consecutive sermons.  I am enjoying the opportunity, but I am also gaining an appreciation for those whose regular task is weekly preaching!  As I sit down this morning to begin preparing for next Sunday, a couple of quotes that came through my inbox last week are bouncing around in my head. Read more

Aug 13

20 Comments

Big Tent Christianity

In just under a month, an interesting “first” will be taking place in Raleigh, NC. Big Tent Christianity: Being and Becoming the Church is a conference/conversation being held to talk about what it is that unites followers of Jesus from a broad range of contexts and perspectives and how we can live and work and talk together in a spirit of cooperation, respect. It is intended to reflect a willingness to learn from rather than shout at/about one another in this crazy thing called the church. It is an attempt to come together under the “big tent” of the body of Christ and to recognize that the big tent is more important than the little tents that we are, perhaps, more familiar and comfortable with. Read more

Aug 10

7 Comments

God in Motion

I just finished reading Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s delightful plea for us to renew our commitment to steward the gift of language as the treasure it is. She is not the first to lament the decline of those who truly understand and appreciate the importance of words (a problem compounded in our text-crazy, Facebooked, Twittered world), but her book communicates these points with the grace and beauty you would expect from someone attempting to lure readers back into the simple truth of how words can move us. Read more

Aug 5

9 Comments

Whatever You Did for the Least of These

One of the best things about being a pastor is simply the opportunity to hear people’s stories, and to see the many and varied ways that God has of drawing people to himself and his purposes.  Yesterday I was in conversation with a person who is on the journey from a dark and destructive past to a more hopeful future.  This person continues to have struggles and has many unresolved issues and unanswered questions, but they are walking in the right direction.  It was good to hear their story and to be able to offer a bit of encouragement. Read more

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