THE LOCAL CHURCH ALWAYS TRUMPS THE PARACHURCH?

'Parachurch organizations...need to regularly evaluate their philosophy and practice in the light of Christ's priority on the church. Similarly, individual Christians, especially those focusing on ministry, should consider whether or not they have slipped into a pattern in which a parachurch group holds more value to them in life and ministry than the local church. No doubt, most parachurch groups are easier to maneuver and get along with than a lot of churches. Yet Jesus sets his affections upon and entrusts the church with his mission in the world. So should we.' 

Phil A Newton, The Mentoring Church, p.121. 

YOU NEED TO HAVE EXPERIENCED A HEALTHY CHURCH TO LEAD A HEALTHY CHURCH?

'One great challenge for many young pastors and church planters happens when they try to lead a church to health when they've never experienced a healthy church firsthand. No academic training can replace the personal experience of a healthy congregation for those who lead a church toward health.' 

Phil A Newton, The Mentoring Church: How Pastors and Congregations Mentor Leaders, p.55. 

CONFIDENT PLURALISM

'Confident pluralism rejects stigmatising others through our speech. At the same time, it requires ut to distinguish between stigmatizing and causing offence...the civic aspiration of tolerance includes the space to make moral judgements. The liberal progressive must be able to say that the conservative moralist holds a view that he finds wrong, misguided, or immoral. And vice versa. Those assertions will likely cause offenses. But they are an important part of the effort to coexist with deep and genuine differences and to allow for people to be persuaded and to change their minds.'

John D Inazu, Confident Pluralism, p.101. 

THE CHALLENGE OF TRUE TOLERANCE

'Tolerance is the most important civic aspiration. It means a willingness to accept genuine difference, including profound moral disagreement. Achieving it is no easy task. As the philosopher Bernard Williams has observed, tolerance is most needed when people find others' beliefs or practices "deeply unacceptable"vor "blasphemously, disastrously, obscenely wrong." The basic difficulty of tolerance, Williams notes, is that we need it "only for the intolerable."'  

John D Inazu, Confident Pluralism, p.87. 

HE DIED FOR ME

'Awake, arise, lift your voice,
let Easter music swell;
rejoice in Christ, again rejoice
and on his praises dwell.

Oh, with what gladness and surprise
the saints in their Savior greet;
nor will they trust their ears and eyes
but by his hand and feet,
those hands of liberal love indeed
in infinite degree,
those feet still free to move and bleed
for millions, and for me.'
Christopher Smart in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.612. 

SOMETIMES DISCRIMINATION IS GOOD

'Sometimes discrimination is a good thing. Elite universities would not be able to function if they had to accept everyone who wanted to attend. Professional choirs need to limit their vocalists to people who can carry a tune. And within the voluntary groups of civil society, we tolerate even some forms of discrimination that would elsewhere be impermissible. We would rightly be enraged if the federal government discriminated on the basis of gender or religion. But we allow Wellesley College to exclude men, and we allow the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to exclude non-Mormons.' 

John D Inazu, Confident Pluralism, p.43.

PLURALISM NEEDS TO ALLOW FOR DISSENT

'A political community that fails to honor the dissent premise is not truly pluralistic - it lacks confidence in itself.'

John D Inazu, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference, p.31.

CHRISTIANS & CULTURE

'...to live as a Christian means to keep inserting a difference into a given culture without ever stepping outside that culture to do so. ' 

Miroslav Volf in Jeremy R Treat, 'Sexuality and the Church' in Beauty, Order and Mystery, p.56.

THE NEW MORALITY

'There is a new morality. The one indisputable law of the new morality is that you cannot deny yourself. Yet the call of Jesus is exactly that: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Lk 9:23).' 

Jeremy R Treat, 'Sexuality and the Church' in Beauty, Order and Mystery, p.56.

SEX & WORLD VIEWS

'...sex is never just about sex. Rather, one's beliefs about sex, gender and marriage mediate their broader views of life. The meaning we attribute sexuality is inseparable from the stories we live by, the wounds we have received, and the relationships we have (or do not have). The contemporary debates over sexuality, therefore, are not ultimately conflicts about what happens under the covers but are a collision of world views.' 

Jeremy R Treat, 'Sexuality and the Church: How Pastoral Ministry Shapes a Theology of Sexuality' in Beauty, Order and Mystery: A Christian Theology of Human Sexuality (Edited Hiestand & Wilson), p.46.

CHRISTIAN HUMILITY

'"Is it I?" is the best question that any disciple can ever ask when Jesus warns about sin, when any church discipline takes place, whenever we hear about the sin committed by anyone else. As we turn the pages of our hearts over against the pages of the Bible each morning, we ought to ask, "Is it I?" These three words reveal the heart of true believers, who know they are capable of any imaginable sin and that it is only Christ's saving grace indwelling them that reveals the truth about them and their desires. "Is it I?" are the assembled words by which the believer discovers himself - the condemning nature of his sin, the recreation of self in Christ.' 

Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.139. 

SAFEGUARDING

'On the one hand, we of course must protect our children from harm. On the other hand, we must not presume that sheltering them will accomplish this.' 

Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.108.

A CHRISTIAN'S HOME IS NOT THEIR CASTLE

'Our homes are not our castles. Indeed, they are not even ours.'
Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.100. 

REPLICATING MIRACLES TODAY

'We love the miraculous stories of Jesus, his feeding of the five thousand, his divine healing, his contagious grace. And we miss the most obvious things about these stories: that we are meant to replicate them in ordinary, nonmiraculous ways.' 

Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.100. 

YOU CAN LOVE WITHOUT APPROVING

'Last year an old friend of mine came out to me as a lesbian. She called and said, "I've been avoiding telling you this, but I like girls. I know that you don't approve."

I was grateful that she called me. She is an old, dear friend. So I asked her a simple question: "Do you think I wouldn't understand?"

She: "No, I know you'd understand. It's that you don't approve. I can't take knowing that you don't approve of me."

Me: "Did we always approve of each other?"

She: "No. No, we didn't."

Me: "We've disagreed on everything! Pixar films, chicken nuggets, spankings! We have never approved of each other, but we have always loved each other. True?"

She: "Very true. We've never approved. We've always loved."

ME; "So why are you changing the rules on me?"

Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World, p.52. 

WE ARE ALL DISCIPLES

'To be human is to disciple. God didn't present Adam and Eve with a choice between discipleship and independence, but between following him and following Satan. We are all disciples; the only question is, of whom?' 

Mark Dever, Discipling, p.44. 

DISCIPLING AS FASHION MODELING

'...discipling is a kind of fashion modeling. No, you're not showing off clothes for the photographer; you're demonstrating a fashion, a way of living, for others to follow. Discipling is inviting them to imitate you, making your trust in Christ an example to be followed. It requires you to be willing to be watched, and then folding people into your life so that they actually do watch.' 

Mark Dever, Discipling, p.40. 

CREATING A SPIRITUAL LEGACY

'For me, discipling is the only way I can evangelize non-Christians and equip Christians in that one place where I can never travel - the future beyond my life. Discipling others is how I try to leave time-bombs of grace.' 

Mark Dever, Discipling, p.34.

DEFINING DISCIPLING

'...discipling is deliberately doing spiritual good to someone so that he or she will become more like Christ.' 

Mark Dever, Discipling: How to help others follow Jesus, p.13.

EXPLAINING GOD'S JUDGEMENT TODAY

'Perhaps the best way of constructing the idea of punishment in our time is in terms of exclusion or rejection. If God is to exclude violence and injustice from his coming kingdom, something has to be done about violence and injustice and every form of enmity that seek to thwart God's good purposes. These are manifestations of the reign of Sin and Death, and they cannot be overlooked or ignored - although many construals of salvation attempt to do so.'

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.504. 

PENAL SUBSTITUTION ONLY MAKES SENSE IN A STORY

'The difficulty with "necessity" in the context of the cross is the idea that God is subject to external logic rather than love for his fallen creation. When presented in narrative form, the motif of substitution has unparalleled warmth.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.496. 

GOD LOVED US EVEN WHEN WE HATED HIM

'God's love is incomprehensible and unchangeable. For it was not after we were reconciled to him through the blood of his Son that he began to love us...Rather, he has loved us before the world was created...The fact that we were reconciled through Christ's death must not be understood as if his Son reconciled us to [The Father] so that he might now begin to love those whom he had hated. Rather, we have already been reconciled to him who loves us, with whom we were enemies on account of sin. The apostle will testify whether I am speaking the truth: "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us" [Romans 5:8]. Therefore he loved us even when we practiced enmity toward him and committed wickedness. Thus in a marvellous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us. For he hated us for what were that he had not made; yet because our wickedness had not entirely consumed his handiwork, he knew how, at the same time, to hate in each one of us what we had made and to love what he had made.' 

Augustine of Hippo in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.487. 

TRUE SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE

'Divine knowledge fills a man full of spiritual activity; it will make a man work as if he would be saved by his works, and yet it will make a man believe he is only saved upon the account of free grace.'

Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth, p.178.

THE POWER OF THE PAST

'The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object but its subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathising observer, who might as well put on his spectacles on to discern odours.'

George Eliot, Adam Bede, p.245. 

DEATH - THE GREAT RECONCILER

'When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.' 

George Eliot, Adam Bede, p.97.

THE CHALLENGE OF FAMILY LIKENESSES

'Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearnings and repulsion; and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every moment. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes - ah! so like our mother's - averted from us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage - the mechanical instinct, the keen sensibility of harmony, the unconscious skill of the modelling hand - galls us, and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass, as our own wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humours and irrational persistence.'

George Eliot, Adam Bede, p.83.

GEORGE ELIOT'S AIM AS A NOVELIST

'...the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.' 

George Eliot quoted in Stephen Gill's Introduction to Adam Bede, p.39.

THE INNOCENCE OF LAMBS

'One runt lamb is born dead, another dies within hours, and for both I grieve with clenched eyes for the life never lived. There is nothing so innocent as a new-born lamb; the scion of the sheep was not appropriated as the Christian symbol for Jesus for nothing. The lamb of God.'

John Lewis-Stemple, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, p.70.

THE BEAUTY OF SMALL ISLANDS

'It is the boundedness of the smaller island, encompassable in a glance, walkable in one day, that relates it to the human body closer than any other conformation of land.'

John Fowles in Philip Marsden, Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place, p.290.

THE GENTRIFICATION OF EMOTIONS

'There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that see to afflict us are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.' 

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.280. 

FAME - THE NEW INTIMACY

'...fame; intimacy's surrogate, its addictive supplanter.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.244.

INTIMACY & SELF-ESTEEM

'...intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.241.

SOCIAL MEDIA & RELATIONSHIPS

'The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.227. 

LONELINESS & INTIMACY

'If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can't exist if the participants aren't willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don't communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and the major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone's arm and blurt the whole thing out...'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.75.

LONELINESS DEFINED

'...the exceeding unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy.' 

Harry Stack Sullivan in Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.23.

LONELINESS AS A PHYSICAL FEELING

'What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It  advances, is what I'm trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.' 

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.11.

URBAN LONELINESS

'You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet the the mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It's possible - easy, even - to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others. Hardly any wonder, then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, p.3.

FRIENDSHIP & FAMILIES

'The capacity of friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.'
Jay McInerney, The Last of the Savages, p.3.

THE PERFECT PROVISION OF JESUS

'...we have no warmth in ourselves; it is true, but Christ came even in winter. We have no light in ourselves; it is true, but he came even in the night.'

John Donne, 'Christ the Light' in Poems and Devotions (Edited Robert Van de Weyer), p.81.

CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT

'It is not an exaggeration to say that in some circles there has been something resembling a campaign of intimidation, so that those who cherish the idea that Jesus offered himself in our place have been made to feel that they are neo-Crusaders, prone to violence, oppressors of women, and enablers of child abuse.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.464. 

OUR INSTINCTIVE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

'There is nothing more characteristic of humanity than the universal tendency of one portion of that humanity to justify itself as deserving and some other portion as undeserving. Nothing is more foundational in Christian faith than the recognition that we can never be justified in that way. To speak of "deserving" is to divide up the world in a fashion that is utterly alien to the gospel.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.451. 

MEETING THE DEVIL

'After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda, a Canadian Forces padre asked me how, after all I had seen and experienced, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him. I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God.' 

Roméo Dallaire in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.439. 

THE EXPERIENCE OF EVIL

'Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.' 

Simone Weil in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.425.

SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS EXPOSED

'Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vaste horde of souls were rumbling towards heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognised at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. 

At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible crickets choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.'   

Flannery O'Connor, 'Revelation' in Collected Stories, p.508. 

THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE IN PRACTICE

'Since Scripture is our only final and authoritative source in understanding truths about God and his relation to the created order, two things are required of us. First,we must submit to and embrace all that Scripture does teach, despite its agreement or disagreement with the values and teaching of our culture. If the authority of Scripture means anything, it means that our mistaken ideas must change to conform to Scripture's teachings, and we must resist at every turn the temptation to conform Scripture's teaching to what seems so clear and true to us from our culture. Granted, this is easier said than  done. Nonetheless, this must be our goal and earnest desire if we are to honor God and his Word in the process of our theological formulation. Second, we must also be ready to stop our theological formulations at the point that Scripture's revealed truth stops. We can violate the authority of Scripture as much by going beyond what it says into areas wherein Scripture is silent as we can by distorting and reshaping what it actually does say to fit the mindset of our culture. In other words we must discipline our minds and our theology to conform to Scripture and to be content to say what it says and remain silent where it is silent.' 

Bruce Ware, God's Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith, p.99.