I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.
Henri Nouwen
Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s been.
Wayne Gretzky
While God’s words are eternal and unchanging the tools we use to access those words do change, and those changes in technology also bring subtle changes to the practice of worship. When we fail to recognize the impact of such technological change, we run the risk of allowing our tools to dictate our methods. Technology should not dictate our values or our methods. Rather, we must use technology out of our convictions and values.
An evangelical is someone who is transformed by the person and work of Jesus Christ, finds the Bible to be authoritative for life and doctrine and practice, and actively works to make the world better.
Kurt Fredrickson - Fuller Theological Seminary
Fredrickson’s is a definition of ‘evangelical’ that I can get excited about.
Check his post out about why the term evangelical has been hijacked by a group of judgemental people with their own agendas, and why we need to recover a much richer understanding of what it means.
Jesus refers to himself as the ‘good’ shepherd. But our word ‘good’ doesn’t really catch the full meaning of the word John has written here… The word John uses can also mean ‘beautiful’. This doesn’t refer to what Jesus looked like. It’s about the sheer attractiveness of what, as the shepherd, he was doing. When he calls, people want to come. When they realize he has died for them, they want to even more. The point of calling Jesus ‘the good shepherd’ is to emphasise the strange, compelling power of his love.
Tom Wright, John for Everyone - Part 1, p154.
Well done is better than well said.
The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers [and Sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.
Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p.308
For I tell you this; one blind loving desire for God alone is more valuable in itself, more pleasing to God and to the saints, more beneficial to your own growth, and more helpful to your friends, both living and dead, than anything else you could do.
Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing
(Found in Mark Yaconelli - Wonder, Fear and Longing)
(Found in Mark Yaconelli - Wonder, Fear and Longing)
If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
1 Corinthians 13:3
Love is a harsh and dreadful thing to ask of us, but it is the only answer.
Dorothy Day
from Shane Claibourne, Jesus for President, p263.
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