Sublime

Here’s the deal. People are not looking for doctrine. They’re looking for a God with skin on, a God they can know, speak with, learn from, struggle with, be honest with, get straight answers from, and connect their lives to.

The pastor somehow needs to take a fifty-person church with few resources, in a denomination of depleted assets, and speed things up to create a five-thousand-member church. Her first step is to make it relevant to fast people living in a compressed present, seeking the good of multiple lifetimes. Retention with these fast-paced people is won by gi

action by personifying acceptance and friendship. It is the pastor’s task, Henry believed, to run at the speed of intimacy—and this was very different from pastors before him.

No person, whoever he or she is or wherever he or she lives, is denied the grasp of God’s heart. We are cherished by God, hunted by God, redeemed by God. And having experienced this, we are reminded that we are called to be bearers of God’s love and truth, and, as bearers, we are to bring that love and truth into our culture, where there exist the

The urgent work calling us in theological education is to touch the divine reality of longing, to enter into its power and newness as the logic inside the work of gathering

so Barth had to start all over, seeking a way to speak of the coming of a transcendent God into the immanent frame of modern life.

much of modern discipleship has focused upon making believers strong enough to survive the city rather than bold enough to transform the city.

The distinction of the church is that it has no other purpose outside the hypostatic grounding of ministry itself.

There are at least two radical transitions to highlight here that move like undercurrents in Edwards’s story, eventually floating us into a secular age and a malaise in our own pastoral identity.