Category Archives: Community & the Church

Daily Riches: The Unfriendliness That’s Killing Your Church (James Emery White)

Posted on by under Awareness, Community & the Church, hospitality, Insiders and Outsiders, Loving Well, The Love of God

“The Technical Assistance Research Program study for the White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that 96 percent of unhappy customers never complain about rude or unfriendly treatment, but 90 percent of those unhappy customers will not return to the place where that unfriendliness was manifest. Further, each one of those unhappy customers will tell nine other people about the lack of friendliness and courteousness, and 13 percent will tell more than twenty other people.  …Now, we all know that every church thinks it’s friendly. I’ve never met a church yet where the people said, “Yeah, we’re mean and proud of it!” No! Every church thinks it’s friendly. But what that means is …they are friendly to each other …to people they know …to people they like …to people who are like them. That’s not friendliness; that’s a clique or, at best, a club. To prove the point, another recent LifeWay Research survey found that while three out of every four churchgoers say they have significant relationships with people at their church, they admit they don’t make an effort with new people. In fact, only one in every six even try. That’s not very friendly. …If you are going to reach the nones [the religiously unaffiliated], they are going to come to you as a none. That means they will come as couples living together, as gay couples, pregnant outside of marriage, addicted, skeptical. Is that going to raise an eyebrow? Or is it taken in stride in a way that makes the person feel instantly at ease? At Meck [the author’s church], it’s just another day of normal.”

“I was a stranger,
and you invited Me in.”
Jesus in Matthew 25:35

Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Stand back and watch people interacting before and after the worship service. Are people being ignored by others? …gathering in familiar cliques? …”stranded” – standing alone in silence, during the time of greeting?
  • Do you make a point of regularly speaking to people you haven’t met?
  • When you attend church are you looking for opportunities to show the love of Jesus to others – or just for your friends?
  • Have you been included – or even worse, in the “inner circle” – too long to remember what it’s like to “break into” a new church?

Abba, use me, and all your people, to embrace others with your love.

For More: The Rise of the Nones by James Emery White

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow my blog, and share it. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

Daily Riches: Summer Vacation Break

Posted on by under approval addiction, awe and wonder, Busyness, Community & the Church, Contemplation and Activism, Desolation's Gift, Embracing Losses and Limits, Emotions and Spirituality, Insiders and Outsiders, Loving Listening, Loving Well, Mysticism, Nationalism and Patriotism, Prayer, Silence, Social Justice, Solitude, Spiritual Formation, The Poor and Disenfranchised, truth and illusion

Hi everyone. I will be on vacation this week, so I won’t be sending out any Daily Riches from richerbyfar.com. As always, I really appreciate your interest in and support of the blog. Thanks for reading and sharing, and for your prayers!

While I’m away, don’t forget there are about 450 daily posts from the last 18 months. I’m sure there is something there you haven’t seen and that may encourage you as you seek after God and God seeks after you. (see below)

Bill

Daily Riches: The Dangerous Drowsing of the Laity (Karl Barth)

Posted on by under Awareness, Change Yourself First, Community & the Church, dissent and resistance, Learning Your Proper Place, truth and illusion, Worship

“No one, however, can be content at this point to be a mere ‘layman,’ to be indolent, to be no more than a passive spectator or reader. No one is excused the task of asking questions or the more difficult task of providing and assessing answers. Preaching in the congregation, and the theology which serves its preparation, can be faithful to its theme and therefore relevant and adapted to the circumstances and edifying to the community, only if it is surrounded, sustained and constantly stimulated and fructified by the questions and answers of the community. With his own questions and answers in matters of right understanding
and doctrine, each individual Christian thus participates in what the community is commanded to do. If he holds aloof, or slackens, or allows himself to sleep, or wanders into speculation and error, he must not be surprised if sooner or later the same will have to be said about the community as such and particularly about its more responsible members. How many complaints about the ‘Church’ would never be made if only those who make them were to realise that we ourselves are the Church, so that what it has or has not to say stands or falls with us. There can be no doubt that all the great errors which have overtaken the preaching and theology of the community in the course of its history have had their true origin, not so much in the studies of the well-known errorists and heretics who have merely blabbed them out, but rather in the secret inattention and neglect, the private drowsing and wandering and erring, of innumerable nameless Christians who were not prepared to regard the listening of the community to the Word as their own concern, who wanted privacy in their thinking, and who thus created the atmosphere in which heresy and error became possible and even inevitable in the community.” Karl Barth

Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Have you thought about your responsibility to be a skillful and critical thinker in the congregation? …are you simply going with the flow?
  • Does your church encourage not only community but individuality? …not only conformity to Biblical norms, but sensitivity to violation of those norms?
  • Do you know the great Christian tradition well enough to know when it’s being ignored or perverted?

Abba, may we love you with our minds as well as our hearts.

For More: Church Dogmatics: A Selection … by Helmut Gollwitzer

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

Daily Riches: Boldly Loving the Unloved (Matt McAlack)

Posted on by under Community & the Church, God's Grace, Insiders and Outsiders, Loving Well, Social Justice, The Poor and Disenfranchised

“This past winter, we had unusually cold weather…. Some nights, temperatures plummeted below zero. Dashing from a warm car through the cold into a warm house, I thought of the dozens of people …near our University, who had no warm place to sleep. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be to try to survive overnight in the cold. The physical cold might be unbearable, but for me, the more painful reality would be that no one loved me enough to invite me inside on such a cold night. I grew up in a Christian environment, but as a child and teenager, I heard very little about God’s heart for those in need. I’m not sure how we missed it, because the Bible is full of passages speaking about God’s justice, compassion, and faithful love for those who have nothing, who are marginalized or oppressed. God is pleased when His church acts like Him, showing compassion for those in need, and God can use this generosity to lead those who don’t know Him to a saving knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Social justice is not the gospel, but it is a natural consequence of the gospel taking root in our hearts. Jesus’ half-brother James says that true faith produces godly action (James 1:22). He further explains that true devotion to God results in taking action to care for those who could never repay us: “orphans and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27, ESV). …In Isaiah 58, the children of Israel are rebuked because of their lack of response to the oppressed, the hungry, and the homeless. The children of Israel were repeatedly commanded to care for those who were displaced or in need, because the Israelites themselves were once immigrants in need. Now they were practicing outward religious activities such as fasting, but they were not demonstrating any evidence of a heart like God’s heart.” Matt McAlack

 “our Lord Jesus Christ … though He was rich,
yet for your sake …became poor”
2 Corinthians 8:9

Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • If you were sitting on the sidewalk in the bitter cold, ignored by people walking past, would you feel loved by God?
  • Doesn’t practicing “social justice” create a context which gives meaning and power to the gospel when it’s preached? If a “gospel” fails the “justice test”, can it really be “good news?”
  • Are you developing a “heart like God’s heart” – not only in church, but on the street?

Abba, help us embrace the poverty that will enable us to enrich others.

For More:  The Prodigal God by Tim Keller

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek God and he seeks you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog.  I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

Daily Riches: God’s Call to Evangelicals … And All Christians (Lloyd Gestoso)

Posted on by under Community & the Church, Contemplation and Activism, Jesus the Savior, Loving Well, Social Justice, The Poor and Disenfranchised

“I want the evangelical church in America to be a place of safety and hope for real people who face real problems. …Christianity is one of the largest religions in the world. Evangelical Christians are very influential in this country. Our churches are very well-positioned all over the country. We have the infrastructure built. But people who have real problems, people who have real challenges, people who need hope often are not turning to our churches. It’s partly because, since the New Deal and all the things that happened in the 1930s, all the people born after that think the government is the group that takes care of people’s needs, and the church takes care of just the spiritual. But if you look at history before the Great Depression, the church was very, very active in caring for all needs, for all people, all children. They were educating the illiterate; they were caring for the orphans; they were really seeking to care for people who were addicted to alcohol. And I think we can be that place of refuge again for people when they see the shallow and empty solutions that are available and they want something more real, something of depth, something beyond what we can see. They want to connect with a real God, to the real Almighty God. And I think sometimes our churches are caught up with what others think or with being afraid to speak out, and we’re often caught up, unfortunately, judging others … looking at each other as competitors, not as brothers and sisters, weighing whether they deserve our time or our love. And that’s really unfortunate. We really need to understand the grace of God that’s in our lives, set aside our preoccupation with deciding people’s worthiness, and really begin to see every human being with value, seeing every human being as a human soul that has crossed our paths for some purpose. That’s really why God put us on Earth: to love profoundly. And I think we are still not known for loving profoundly.” Lloyd Gestoso

“whoever loves others
has fulfilled the law.”
Romans 13:8

  Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Do you calculate “people’s worthiness” before you decide whether to help them?
  • Does your denomination “love profoundly?” …your church? Would others use those words to describe you?
  • Is your church more likely to produce people who are “judging others” or helping others “connect with” the God who is real?

Abba, help us, whoever we are, to love profoundly.

For More: The Soul of Politics by Jim Wallis

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek God and he seeks you. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

Daily Riches: Community, Stability and Spirituality (Joan Chittister)

Posted on by under Awareness, Change Yourself First, Community & the Church, Death Daily, Ego Issues, Embracing Losses and Limits, Emotions and Spirituality, Learning Your Proper Place, Loving Well, Spiritual Formation, the importance of stability

“Everything in life, contrary to Madison Avenue’s guarantees, can’t be cured or resolved or eliminated. Some things must simply be endured. Some things must simply be borne. Some things must simply be accepted. Community and relationships enable us to do that. …It is in community where we find out who we really are. It is life with another that shows my impatience and life with another that demonstrates my possessiveness and life with another that gives notice to my nagging devotion to the self. Life with someone else, in other words, doesn’t show me nearly as much about his or her shortcomings as it does about my own. In human relationships I learn how to soften my hard spots and how to reconcile and how to care for someone else besides myself. In human relationships I learn that theory is no substitute for love. It is easy to talk about the love of God; it is another things to practice it. That’s how relationships sanctify me. They show me where holiness is for me. That’s how relationships develop me. They how me where growth is for me. If I’m the passive-victim type, then assertiveness may have something to do with coming to wholeness. If I’m the domineering character in every group, then a willingness to listen and to be led may be my call to life. Alone, I am what I am, but in community I have the chance to become everything that I can be. And so, stability bonds me to this group of people and to these relationships so that resting in the security of each other we can afford to stumble and search, knowing that we will be caught if we fall and we will be led where we cannot see by those who have been there before us.” Joan Chittister

“Iron sharpens iron,
So one man sharpens another.”
Proverbs 27:17

 Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Are you discovering “who you really are” through your life in community – perhaps as a spouse, sibling, parent, roommate, employee, church member, neighbor? What about you needs to change?
  • Have you discovered in your relationships that some things won’t change and “must simply be endured?” Are you doing that well?
  • Are you engaged in community life so that, you are not only learning about yourself, but changing? Is a probationary approach to relationships hindering your transformation?

Abba, help me to submit to this messy but essential part of spirituality.

For More: Wisdom Distilled From the Daily by Joan Chittister

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek God and he seeks you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog.  I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

Daily Riches: God’s Gift and Our Need of Diversity In the Church (Debbie Thomas)

Posted on by under awe and wonder, Community & the Church, Insiders and Outsiders, Loving Well

“In the New Testament Pentecost story Luke tells, the Holy Spirit descended on 120 believers in Jerusalem on the fiftieth day after Jesus’ resurrection. The Spirit empowered them to testify to God’s great deeds, emboldened the apostle Peter to preach to a bewildered crowd of Jewish skeptics, and drew three thousand converts in one day. For Christians, Pentecost marks the birthday story of the Church. And what a fantastical birthday story it is, full of details to challenge the imagination. Tongues of fire. Rushing winds. Accusations of drunkenness. Mass baptism. One could spend years unpacking these details. But here’s the one I find most riveting: ‘All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.’  ‘At this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.’ Christians often speak of Pentecost as the reversal of Babel, the Old Testament story in which God divided and scattered human communities by multiplying our languages. But in fact, Pentecost didn’t reverse Babel; it perfected and blessed it. When the Holy Spirit came, he didn’t restore humanity to a common language; he declared all languages holy and equally worthy of God’s stories …he wove multilingualism into the very fabric of the Church. …Languages carry the full weight of their respective cultures, histories, psychologies, and spiritualities. To speak one language as opposed to another is to orient oneself differently in the world – to see differently, hear differently, process and punctuate reality differently. …If this is true, then what does it mean that the Holy Spirit empowered the first Christians to speak in an unmatched diversity of languages? Was God saying, in effect, that his Church, from its very inception, needed to honor the boundless variety and creativity of human voices?  That he was calling it to proclaim the great deeds of God in every tongue – not merely because multiculturalism is progressive and fashionable, or because the church is a ‘politically correct’ institution – but because God’s deeds themselves demand such diverse tellings? Could it be that there is no single language on earth that can capture the deeds of God? Here’s another detail I love about Pentecost: when the disciples and their friends began to speak in foreign languages, the crowds gathered outside their meeting place understood them. And this – the fact of their comprehension – was what confused them. They were not confused by the message itself; the message came through with perfect clarity in their respective languages. What the crowds found baffling was that God would condescend to speak to them in their own mother-tongues. That he would welcome them so intimately, with words and expressions hearkening back to their birthplaces, their childhoods, their beloved cities, countries, and cultures of origin. As if to say, ‘This Spirit-drenched place, this fledgling church, this new Body of Christ, is yours. You don’t have to feel like outsiders here; we speak your language, too. Come in. Come in and feel at home.’ …I wonder what it would be like if the Church allowed the Holy Spirit to transform it into a place of deep and implicit belonging – not for the few, but for everyone. I wonder how our ministries would need to change so that the crowds listening outside our doors would hear ‘Welcome!’ in languages they comprehend.” Debbie Thomas

“with your blood you purchased for God
persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.”
Revelation 5:9

Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Is there sufficient diversity in your church?
  • Do you make a point to reach out to “different” people with God’s love?
  • How can you be part of God’s “welcome” to outsiders?

Abba, use our many voices in the telling of your deeds.

For More: “Against Christianese” by Debbie Thomas

In today’s post I broke my own rule of “400 words” or less. This was just to important and beautiful not to share. Thanks for reading. – Bill

Daily Riches: Detaching Religion From Power and Money (Hans Küng and Richard Rohr)

Posted on by under Community & the Church, dissent and resistance, Downward Mobility, Ego Issues, Learning Your Proper Place, Social Justice, The Poor and Disenfranchised, The Upside-Down Kingdom
“Jesus turns with sympathy and compassion to all those to whom no one else turns; the weak, sick, neglected, social rejects. People were and are always glad to pass these sorts by. …And the devout monks of Qumran (and similarly up to a point the rabbis), faithful to their rule, excluded from the very beginning certain groups of men: ‘No madmen, or lunatic, or simpleton, or fool, no blind man, or maimed, or lame, or deaf man, and no minor, shall enter into the Community….’ Jesus does not turn away from any of these …but draws them to himself….” Hans Küng
.

“We see in the Gospels that it’s the lame, the poor, the blind, the prostitutes, the drunkards, the tax collectors, the sinners, the outsiders, and the foreigners who tend to follow Jesus. It is those on the inside and the top who crucify him (elders, chief priests, teachers of the Law, and Roman occupiers). Shouldn’t that tell us something really important about perspective? Every viewpoint is a view from a point, and we need to critique our own perspective and privilege if we are to see truth. …Once Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire (313), we largely stopped reading the Bible from the side of the poor and the oppressed. We read it from the side of the political establishment and, I am sorry to say, from the priesthood side … instead of from the side of people hungry for justice and truth. No wonder Jesus said, ‘I did not come for the healthy but for the sick’ (Mark 2:17). This priority has the power to constantly detach religion from its common marriage to power, money , and self-importance.” Richard Rohr

  “If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes
and say, ‘Here’s a good seat for you,’
but say to the poor man, ‘You stand there”’
or ‘Sit on the floor by my feet,’
have you not discriminated among yourselves
and become judges with evil thoughts?’”
James 2:3

 Moving From Head to Heart

  • Wow, James sounds like his famous half-brother! Is there a “pecking system” in your church? Is anyone treated better than anyone else – given more honor, attention, or influence – because of wealth?
  • Will you support Jesus’ agenda to “detach religion from its common marriage to power and money?”
  • Are you able to read the Bible “from the side of the poor and the oppressed?” What is your “view from a point?”

Abba, may I learn from you a bias for the bottom.

For More: Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek God. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily.  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

 

 

Daily Riches: “Statio” – Coming to a Full Stop for Contemplation (Kathleen Norris)

Posted on by under "Being" with Jesus, Awareness, Community & the Church, Mindfulness, Prayer, Stillness, Worship

“Once, when I was the only guest one Sunday night at a women’s monastery, the sisters invited me to join them in statio, the community’s procession into church. The word, which means ‘standing’ in Latin, is one of the many terms from the Roman Army that ancient Christian monastics adopted for their own purposes. To get into position, to station oneself, to take a stand. To wait in line, in a posture that invites individual watchfulness, to ‘recollect’ oneself before reentering church.  …I didn’t realize it at the time, but …not being able to amble into church on my own to find a choir stall pushed me into recognizing what the sisters already sensed, that Christ is actively present in their worshiping community. Not as a static idea or principle, but a Word made flesh, a listening, active Christ who in the gospels tells us that he prays for us, and who promises to be with us always.  Walking slowly into church in that long line of women taught me much about liturgical time and space. I found to my surprise that the entire vespers service had more resonance for me because of the solemn way I had entered into it.” Kathleen Norris

In some contemplative circles today, another, but related, meaning attaches to “statio.” Statio refers to the practice of pausing after finishing one thing and before starting another. It’s like Merton’s “recollecting” of oneself (one’s communion with one’s soul), or what Richard Foster describes as “reorienting our lives like a compass needle.” It’s simply taking a moment to lift up to God whatever has just transpired, and petition him to be in whatever is next. Such a practice can be very brief, but no doubt on occasions will lead into something longer and unexpected between the individual and God. Certainly it will help us to be more present to God through the day.

“Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise”
Psalm 100:4

Moving From the Head to the Heart
  • Is your church experience given “more resonance” because of how you enter into it?
  • Do you attempt to “recollect yourself” before the service begins?
  • What do you do to be intentionally “present” to Christ who is also present as the church gathers?

Abba, help me to constantly recalibrate my soul so I am aware of and available to you.

For More: Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow my blog, and share it. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

 

Daily Riches: The Temptation to be Relevant, The Need to Be Respected (Henri Nouwen and Brennan Manning)

Posted on by under applause, approval addiction, Being the Beloved, Community & the Church, Ego Issues, Striving and drivenness, Success

“The first temptation with which the devil accosted Jesus was that of turning stones into loaves of bread. This is the temptation to be relevant, to do something that is needed and can be appreciated by people – to make productivity the basis of our ministry. How often have we heard these words: ‘What is the value of talking about God to hungry people? What is the use of proclaiming the Good News to people who lack food, shelter, or clothing? What is needed are people who can offer real help and support. Doctors can heal, lawyers can defend, bankers can finance, social workers can restructure. But what can you do? What do you have to offer?’ This is the tempter speaking! This temptation touches us at the center of our identity. In a variety of ways we are made to believe that we are what we produce. This leads to a preoccupation with products, visible results, tangible goods, and progress. The temptation to be relevant is difficult to shake since it is usually not considered a temptation, but a call. We make ourselves believe that we are called to be productive, successful, and efficient people whose words and actions show that working for God’s Reign is at least as dignified an occupation as working for General Electric, Mobil Oil, or the government. But this is giving in to the temptation to be relevant and respectable in the eyes of the world.” Henri Nouwen

“The world will respect us if we court it, it will respect us even more if we reject it in disdain and anger, but it will hate us if we simply take no notice of it or it’s priorities or what it thinks of us. In John’s gospel the Jews are said to be incapable of believing because ‘they receive glory from one another.’ There is a radical incompatibility between human respect and faith in Jesus Christ.” Brennan Manning

“… you accept glory from one another
but do not seek the glory
that comes from the only God”
John 5:44

Moving From the Head to the Heart
.
  • Are you “hooked” on others’ approval? What does that mean?
  • In Jesus’ day, it was the religious community “receiving glory from one another.” Pleasing the world is probably not our gravest danger.
  • Are you prepared for the day when you seem unproductive?

Abba, may your approval be all I need.

For More: The Signature of Jesus by Brennan Manning

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow my blog, and share it. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

Daily Riches: The Tragic and Ludicrous Brokenness of the Church (Frederick Buechner)

Posted on by under Community & the Church, Humility, Learning Your Proper Place, truth and illusion

There are Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians. There are Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists. There are Disciples of Christ. There are Seventh-day Adventists and … Moravians. There are Quakers. And that’s only for starters. New denominations spring up. Old denominations split up and form new branches. The question is not, Are you a Baptist? but, What kind of a Baptist? It is not, Are you a member of the Presbyterian church? but Which Presbyterian church? A town with a population of less than five hundred may have churches of three or four denominations and none of them more than a quarter full on a good Sunday. There are some genuine differences between them, of course. The methods of church government differ. They tend to worship in different forms all the way from chanting, incense, and saints’ days to a service that is virtually indistinguishable from a New England town meeting with musical interludes. Some read the Bible more literally than others. If you examine the fine print, you may even come across some relatively minor theological differences among them, some stressing one aspect of the faith, some stressing others. But if you were to ask the average member of any congregation to explain those differences, you would be apt to be met with a long, unpregnant silence. By and large they all believe pretty much the same things and are confused about the same things and keep their fingers crossed during the same parts of the Nicene Creed. …Then add to that picture the Roman Catholic Church, still more divided from the Protestant denominations than they are from each other [and the Orthodox church], and by the time you’re through, you don’t know whether to burst into laughter or into tears. …When Jesus took the bread and said, ‘This is my body which is broken for you’ (1 Corinthians 11:24), it’s hard to believe that even in his wildest dreams he foresaw the tragic and ludicrous brokenness of the Church as his body. There’s no reason why everyone should be Christian in the same way and every reason to leave room for differences, but if all the competing factions of Christendom were to give as much of themselves to the high calling and holy hope that unites them as they do now to the relative inconsequentialities that divide them, the Church would look more like the Kingdom of God for a change and less like an ungodly mess.” Frederick Buechner

“so that they may be one as we are one.”
Jesus in John 17:11

Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • By some estimates there are 41,000 denominations. Could your group really have cornered the truth?
  • Pick a group that differs from yours (evangelical, Catholic, Episcopal, Quaker). Can you list weak points in your group and strong points in the other one? Are you open to learning from others who identify as Christians but have views different from yours?
  • Jesus spoke of a unified church. What can you do to practice this “oneness?”

Abba, help us!

For More: Whistling in the Dark by Frederick Buechner

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you.  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

Daily Riches: Disappointed with Church (Eugene Peterson and Charles Spurgeon)

Posted on by under Community & the Church, Loving Well

“Every time I move to a new community, I find a church close by and join it—committing myself to worship and work with that company of God’s people. I’ve never been anything other than disappointed. Everyone turns out to be biblical, through and through: murmurers, complainers, the faithless, the inconstant, those plagued with doubt and riddled with sin, boring moralizers, glamorous secularizers. Every once in a while a shaft of blazing beauty seems to break out of nowhere and illuminate these companies, and then I see what my sin-dulled eyes had missed: Word of God-shaped, Holy Spirit-created lives of sacrificial humility, incredible courage, heroic virtue, holy praise, joyful suffering, constant prayer, persevering obedience.” Eugene Peterson

“We shall, as we ripen in grace, have greater sweetness towards our fellow Christians. Bitter-spirited Christians may know a great deal, but they are immature. Those who are quick to censure may be very acute in judgment, but they are as yet very immature in heart. He who grows in grace remembers that he is but dust, and he therefore does not expect his fellow Christians to be anything more; he overlooks ten thousand of their faults, because he knows his God overlooks twenty thousand in his own case. He does not expect perfection in the creature, and, therefore, he is not disappointed when he does not find it. …I know we who are young beginners in grace think ourselves qualified to reform the whole Christian church. We drag her before us, and condemn her straightway; but when our virtues become more mature, I trust we shall not be more tolerant of evil, but we shall be more tolerant of infirmity, more hopeful for the people of God, and certainly less arrogant in our criticisms.” Charles H. Spurgeon

“Behold my servant…
my chosen one in whom I delight …
A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.”
Isaiah 42:1,3

Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Are you disappointed with your church or denomination – the church at large?
  • Have you witnessed sacrificial humility, incredible courage, heroic virtue, joyful suffering there as well?
  • How might our church today be “tolerant of evil?”

Abba, may I be, not more tolerant of evil in my church, but more tolerant of infirmity, more hopeful, more aware of my own twenty thousand faults.

For More: Leap Over a Wall by Eugene Peterson

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow my blog, and share it. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”