Sublime

The body of Christ is that unique community of practice whose members own up to the fact that we don’t always love what we say we do—that the “devices and desires” of our hearts outstrip our best intentions. The practices of Christian worship are a tangible, practiced, re-formative way to address this tension and gap.

of Christian discipleship.

The body of Christ is made of all kinds of people, some of whom I find obnoxious, arrogant, self-righteous, or misguided (charges, I’m sure, others have rightly applied to me).

But at this moment in the life of the Euro-tribal churches, we need to balance our primary posture of ecclesiocentrism and discern where the Spirit is calling us to go lightly and participate in the life of the neighborhood.

Our churches are occupied by sinners of all kinds. If the gospel is regularly being preached in your church, you will eventually become a magnet for the messiest kinds of sinners. The kind of people Jesus attracted. The kind of people church people often fear messing up their tidy church. Those are the kinds of people pastors must stay tuned in to

There are many “ordinary” ways to be ambassadors of the extraordinary gospel, but none more important than building up the body of Christ by committing to a local church, however boring it may seem. As Kevin DeYoung says, In the grand scheme of things, most of us are going to be more of an Ampliatus (Rom. 16:8) or Phlegon (v. 14) than an apostle Pa

If souls are God’s greatest concern then large amounts of people being discipled is important, and multiple venues and services are a must for the way forward. We must put the Great Commission above cosiness.

I don’t believe we modern Christians should always be comfortable with thinking of our God as an absolute monarch. It goes against important values I insist we should still cherish, even if those values have been given to us more by modern liberalism than by traditional religion, values such as equality, freedom, and democracy.