Prayer, Spiritual Formation, and Ministry

A leading man in the Confessing Church recently said to me: “We have no time for meditation now, the ordinands should learn how to preach and to catechize.” That seems to me either a complete misunderstanding of what young theologians are like today or a culpable ignorance of how preaching and catechism come to life. The questions that are seriously put to us today by young theologians are : How do I learn to pray? How do I learn to read the Bible? If we cannot help them there we cannot help them at all. And there is really nothing obvious about it. To say, “If someone does not know that, then he should not be a minister” would be to exclude most of us from our profession. It is quite clear to me that all these things are only justified when alongside them and with them - at just the same time!-there is really serious and sober theological, exegetical and dogmatic work going on. Otherwise all these questions are given the wrong emphasis.

From a letter that Bonhoeffer wrote to Barth. Quoted from the Mataxas biography on Bonhoeffer

From Lostness to Adventure

The puzzle is why so many people live so badly. Not so wickedly, but so inanely. Not so cruelly, but so stupidly. There is little to admire and less to imitate in the people who are prominent in our culture. We have celebrities but not saints. Famous entertainers amuse a nation of bored insomniacs...

All the same, we continue to have an unquenchable thirst for wholeness, a hunger for righteousness. When we get thoroughly disgusted with the shams and cretins that are served up to us daily as celebrities, some of us turn to Scripture to satisfy our need for someone to look up to....

When we do turn to Scripture for help in this matter we are apt to be surprised. One of the first things that strikes us about the men and women in Scripture is that they were disappointingly  non-heroic. We do not find splendid moral examples. We do not find  impeccably virtuous models...It refuses to feed our lust for hero worship. It will not pander to our adolescent desire to join a fan club. The reason is, I think, clear enough.

Fan clubs encourage secondhand living...Something very different takes place in the life of faith: each person discovers all the element of a unique and original adventure..The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God's creative genius is endless.

Run with the Horses by Eugene H. Peterson

How infighting will kill the Church

Most of my friends who no longer attend church, and the majority of my friends no longer attend, have left over petty arguments about theology. It’s not that they left because people didn’t agree with them, they actually left because they got tired of hearing other people argue about their interpretation of scripture. They wanted to talk and learn, and a very small group of people simply wanted to dominate the conversation with something they discovered last year when they read a book. These friends don’t mind subscribing to a theological grid, they just got tired of all the jabbing...

Finish the article here: How infighting will kill the Church by Donald Miller

The Meaning of Love

On this day where there is much talk about love, it is good to be reminded what love truly means!

The Danger of Dancing Too Closely

How the German Christians justified twisting and bending the traditionally accepted meaning of the Scriptures and the doctrines of the church is complicated…There’s little question that the liberal theological school of Schleiermacher and Harnack helped push things along in this direction. But the other piece of this puzzle has to do with the confusion that inevitable arises when the Christan faith becomes too closely related to a cultural or national identity. For many Germans, their national identity had become so melted together with whatever Lutheran Christan faith they had that it was impossible to see either clearly. After four hundred years of taking for granted that all Germans were Lutheran Christians, no one really knew what Christianity was anymore.

Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas

The Kingdom of God, Grace, and Discipleship

Dallas Willard talks about the kingdom of God and the role of grace in the life of the believer and non-believer.

Welcoming Spirit

The world seems to become more dangerous every day....Because we have been welcomed into the love of Christ and received as dearly loved children, we can offer the world a place of safety and healing. We can incarnate the welcoming heart of God for the world. God welcomes stranger, inviting them to share his home and get to know his family.
Spiritual Disciplines Handbook by Adele Calhoun

Great Quotes from Bonhoeffer

I am reading Eric Metaxas biography of Bonhoeffer. It is a fantastic work and I just had to share some of these great quotes.

Where a people prays, there is the church, and where the church is; there is never loneliness.

Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued.

Commenting on race relations in the 1920s:

The separation of whites from blacks in the southern states really does make a rather shameful impression....It is a bit unnerving that in a country with so inordinately many slogans about brotherhood, peace, and so on, such things still continue completely uncorrected.