Sublime

Follow Jesus together. … Into the neighborhood. … Travel lightly. …

to reclaiming the prophetic tradition and working with multi-faith partners to build a society of equity and equality, compassion and justice.

I want to supplement Willard’s emphasis on the individual practice of the spiritual disciplines with what might be a counterintuitive thesis in our “millennial” moment: that the most potent, charged, transformative site of the Spirit’s work is found in the most unlikely of places—the church!

Similarly, when we as Christians today engage the civic space, we’re representatives of our Father in heaven. To properly go about our Father’s business, we must be informed about the civic process and understand the relationship between church and

But preaching the Gospel is a function of trying to reach the human heart, whether people are poor or rich or middle class. And the bad breaks and tragic mysteries of life exist in plenitude in a city parish.

Because a musical, cultural form that’s only about forty years old should not have more impact than the church, which has existed for thousands of years. We should be the main communicator about challenges that happen in our country on race and justice. We should be the first place that people look to for answers. We should be the ones presenting a

But if we recover a sense of the primacy of God’s action in worship—that worship is a site of gracious, divine initiative—then we might better understand how and why worship is the center of discipleship. We should approach the sanctuary with a different set of expectations—that we will be met and remade by a living, active Lord.

What we actually need is to imagine that God is up to something. Imagine that God is active in the midst of what seems to be an unremitting unraveling of not just our churches but our way of life in North America.