a pastor in Austin
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missional leadership is a creative art. It calls for leaders to create from within themselves, allowing the Spirit of God to make room in their lives to facilitate the writing of a new story. The leader is not the author of this new story. This is God’s story that is realized as the people of [...]
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my new version of what the Bible is about reads as follows: it is about the mystery by which the power of God works to form this world into the Holy City, the New Jerusalem that comes down out o heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” — Robert Farrar Capon [...]
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To organized opposition [Jesus] responds with the formal founding of a new social reality. New teachings are no threat, as long as the teacher stands alone; a movement, extending his personality in both time and space, presenting an alternative to the structures that were there before, challenges the system as no mere words ever could.” [...]
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we are inoculating the world with a mild form of Christianity, so that it is now practically immune against the real thing. Vast areas of the Christian world are inoculated with a mild form of Christianity, and the real thing seems strange and impossible.” — E. Stanley Jones (80 years ago) in The Christ of [...]
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A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.” – Seth Godin in Tribes
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We’re in the process of getting our 501c3 status with the IRS, and one of my tasks at hand it write my job description. With that in mind, I read the quote below from Richard Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament. If you replace Paul with John and Mediterranean with Austin, I think [...]
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I read this today, and it seemed rather timely…
There is no room for a political fanaticism that supposes that my political achievements will establish God’s kingdom, or declares a holy war against opponents, or tramples on individual human beings in the pursuit of a political millennium. The public political act has its real meaning simply [...]
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Each of us possesses amazing resources of knowledge, wisdom, and creativity. Our organizations need to learn to respect, nurture, and accomodate this wealth of human capital. We need to learn how to liberate the power of peers to create extraordinary organizations. Unfortunately, the way most companies are managed today, they fail to make use of [...]
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The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned [...]
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And this means, as is well known, that his theology has the character of inaugurated eschatology, that is, of a sense that God’s ultimate future has come forwards into the middle of history, so that the church is living within — indeed, is constituted precisely by simultaneously within! — God’s new world and the present [...]
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Our destiny, our future, and our joy are in the Eucharist, using whatever blessing we’ve received, whatever resources, talents, skills, and passions God has given us, to make the world a better place. Disconnection from the suffering of the world, isolation from the cry of the oppressed, indifference to the poverty around us will always [...]
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Gathering and sending are related to one another like breathing in and breathing out. The important thing is therefore to view life in the everyday world as just as important as the gathering of the congregation in the feast of worship.” — Jurgen Moltmann
(Lovely thought. I think I’ll steal it for our church gatherings page.)
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The church now seems to stand in the same place as God stood in some 2,500 years ago: misrepresented, accused of bigotry, portrayed as narrow-minded and in love with power, only interested in buildings, ready to smite the dirty and sinful, over-occupied with sex, and ready to lend support for unjust wars … And so [...]
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Our problem today: the space for imagination to expand and take shape is inversely proportional to the speed at which we live. Driven hard and fast, we lack the time to allow alternate worlds and possibilities to form, careening past small turnings and exits, bound to follow the obvious straight paths of the present arrangement.” [...]
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We have to create, and sustain, communities where this life is being lived in such a way that when we speak of it we are obviously telling the truth. That is the hard part. As long as our churches are places where we struggle to sustain an hour or two’s public worship per week, with [...]
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