Sublime

The keys to addressing the Great Dechurching will be whether churchgoing people will be willing to seek understanding, relate with wisdom, build healthier institutions, embrace our exilic nature, and seek a gospel that is true, good, and beautiful.

When you see your matter going black, rejoice, for this is the beginning of the work.-Rosarium

At most

It is not an exaggeration to suggest that Willard’s critique of contemporary evangelicalism places him as one who generally views the enterprise as focused on objectives often contradictory to those presented as the missio Dei throughout the whole of Scripture.

Art is confrontation.

This second order is a world in which, to use Gerard Manley Hopkins’s wonderful phraseology, “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.”2

This leaves Conservative practice rich in building community and meaning, yet straining to discern which parts of the tradition retain abiding wisdom (hence, authority) and which parts require new formulation to best reflect contemporary understandings of divine values.

Broken cities need the church to show up beyond the building.

Congregations, and the leaders that serve them, need a shared vision for worship that is grounded in more than personal aesthetic tastes.