Yes … things that I’ve said or written and want to remember. Will I ever be quotable? I dunno. Don’t care … well … maybe a little? Anyway … perhaps some of these are worth discussing regardless?
Back in the day, when developing my theory of learning: the TRU Learning Theory (T=Think, R=Reason, U= Understand), I once stated that “the key to mental development is the ability to challenge one’s own understanding.” A few people decided that was really neat and would remind me of what I said with some frequency.
The key to mental development is the ability to challenge one’s own understanding
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Back in the day when I was pastoring part-time, the sermon topic swerved into humility. It occurred to me that we all tend tho think poorly about that word. So, I thought long and hard and came up with this.
Humility IS NOT how small you perceive yourself to be in relation to another.
Rather, humility is how much larger, by an act of your own will, you choose to make the needs of another relative to your own.
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Human sexuality in the 20th century caused a great deal of anger and angst within Christianity. It caused Christians to behave in un-Christ-like ways towards the world. I had a thought or two about that problem.
The face of Christianity is perceived as being absent from its biblical duties to care for people and is instead caustic, political, anti-Science, etc. The world knows that we are distracted from our central mission and we (as a group) are too belligerent to no
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The context for understanding truth is always in relationship. Access to others lives is necessarily in relationships that warrant such access. You don’t get to kick in the door of another persons life and take it over.
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Personal relationships have more access to others lives than pulpits do, especially if those pulpits end up deputizing moral police instead of developing missional people.
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A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away … OK, it was here on Earth. Bottom line is that I realized from the bazillionth reading of Philippians 4 that the peace of God surpasses my understanding rather than being encompassed by it. I was miserable from trying to engineer the peace of God in my own life, so I stopped doing that it BAM! There it is. Nice. Then this occurred to me.
The nobility of your cause IS NOT a license to manufacture God’s Peace.
As if you could in the first place.
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The Trump and COVID era brought out the rank ugliness that had been festering within evangelical Christianity for decades prior. Whether that quality is representative of most evangelicals is a topic I’ll leave for another time, but there is no denying that the face of evangelical Christianity is perceived as caustic and uncaring, especially when it manifests politically as Trumpian GOP worship.
The Barna Research Group reports that 51% of churchgoers do not know or recognize the Great Commission when shown in parallel with other famous passages in Scripture. It seems to me that Christians are woefully uneducated in the most basic things about Christianity’s central mission, which explains why they seem to be so off-mission within the politicization of their faith.
Dear Christian,
You were put here to build a Kingdom NOT of this world rather than a nation therein.
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Ignoble means are the end of a noble cause.
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Unjust hands carry a just cause to its doom.
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Clark Vangilder's Cognitions 