Sublime

God is the master artist: it is his pattern for the tabernacle, and it is our home he creates and cultivates in the opening chapters of Genesis. As Andy Crouch notes, the creation account of Genesis reveals God as an artist and a gardener.

Soon enough, the most central question for both mainline and evangelical pastors was, How can we reach more and more people? They did not ask how they could testify to God’s eternity breaking into time. They asked how they could keep from losing pace up against the threat of secular 2.

We live in a time—call it a secular age—when society has devalued the pastor and yet we nevertheless yearn for ministry.

enter the culture,

Everything dies when God dies, including our link to the wisdom of the ancient world and to the established conceptions of human meaning, purpose, and value. Merely adding God back, as a character who matches the modern furniture of our disenchanted reality, is insufficient. Given enough time in the darkness, “straying through an infinite nothing,”

The experiential is central to Paul; faith cannot be divided from your own (or someone else’s testimony of) encountering the living Christ.

Our secular age has kept pastoral power intact but cut it off from divine action, giving the pastor tacit, and for some a tangible taste of, confusion.

We live in a Genesis 3 world with a Genesis 1 blueprint on the trajectory to a Revelation 21 future.