Everyone knows that apathy, not anger, is the opposite of love, though frustrated anger can lead to apathy. Complacency, not passion, is the opposite of discipleship, though frustrated passion can lead to complacency. Complacency is the bane of today’s denominational Church.The western, American,denominational church is undergoing, as my colleague Len Sweet puts it, a “reproduction problem.”[1] It...
The youth pastor at one of my former congregations had a cartoon taped to his office door. It pictured a little guy standing, trembling, in front of a massive desk behind which was sitting a big, big man. The little guy wore torn jeans and a T-shirt, and had a leather loop around his neck holding a cross in front of his chest. His hair was messy and his toes peeked out the front of his sandals. A ...
I have here a ruler. It’s the way we measure nearly everything in life. If you are old enough, you remember having one of these in your desk at school, so that you could use it during math class. These wooden rulers now are nearly obsolete. At least in the form we see here. But they haven’t been vanquished from our minds and the way we think about measurement, behavior, and life. Our word ruler co...