thoughts from a sunday

 You couldn't spend your whole life in Campus Crusade for Christ,

or raise your daughter as a Promise Keeper,

or count on groups like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition

to sustain your belief system beyond the next election cycle.

For that kind of staying power you [need] a confessional tradition,

a church,

an institution capable of outlasting its charismatic founders.

-Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

 

Wisdom lies in anchoring ourselves to the church

as the church is anchoed to Christ.

Across time and culture and trends,

the church remains.

-Peter Greer, Chris Horst, Mission Drift: The Unspoken Crisis Facing Leaders, Charities and Churches

 

Jesus Christ is building His church.  This gives me so much hope.  We are not building it.  He is. 
So when we fail, and people fail, and things and lives get broken, and solutions that seemed perfect don't work, when ministry is messy and discipleship is draining, He is still building and He is still extending grace and the Cross is still power to those who believe and His Word is still not returning void.

I am loving this song today.

 

I know there is poor and hideous suffering,

and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war.

I have lived pain, and my life can tell:

I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks

for early light dappled through leaves

and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July

and the song of crickets on humid nights a

nd the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls

and all the good things that a good God gives.

-Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts