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Pastors need to be ethnographers of the everyday, helping parishioners see their own environment as one that is formative, and all too often deformative. The pastor will sometimes be like the old fish in Wallace’s parable, regularly asking us, “How’s the water?” Eventually we learn: “Oh, this is water.”

James K. A. Smith • You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

St. Augustine (AD 354–430) in affirming every human being as a trinity of existence (being), intellect, and will.

Vishal Mangalwadi • The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization

the buffered self seems predisposed to lock divine action out of its inner world, radically reversing Augustine’s vision and making things very difficult for the pastor. If God is to enter this space that Augustine helped make, then God must be stripped of otherness and made into a therapeutic crutch that the brave can outgrow.

Andrew Root • The Pastor in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #2): Ministry to People Who No Longer Need a God

So if someone asked me to introduce them to Jesus, I would say, “Come and see. Let me show you Jesus with skin on.” Sometimes we have evangelicals (usually from the suburbs) who pretentiously ask how we “evangelize people.” I usually tell them that we bring folks like them here to learn the kingdom of God from the poor, and then send them out to te

Shane Claiborne • The Irresistible Revolution, Updated and Expanded: Living as an Ordinary Radical

But Noel tells me his job is simply a chance to be “a minister of common grace.”

Tish Harrison Warren • Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

When our Christian homes are open, we make transparent to a watching world what Christ is doing with our bodies, our families, and our world. When we daily gather with family of God in organic and open and communal ways and invite those who do not yet know Christ to enter, we accompany one another in suffering. We bear one another’s burdens.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield • The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do

Marilynne Robinson • Gilead

And yet, the hunger for holiness in terms of a sense of being rooted — grounded in shifting ground — which oddly means that to be, what, to be holy is to keep one’s balance while the earth moves under our feet.

Barbara Brown Taylor — “This Hunger for Holiness” | The On Being Project

As the stars of their own stories, neither the party nor the church could love the world. Without loving the world, they were blind to the act of a God who is God. Barth learned from the Blumhardts that God acts in the world. If God acts in the world, God does not abandon the world but instead seeks its salvation.