Following Jesus in rejecting empire
Revival will always be marked by the Church coming out of Empire. Let me repeat that: Revival will ALWAYS be marked by the Church coming out of Empire; because the heart of revival is the increase of Christ’s government and his shalom (in the words of Isaiah) and the heart of Empire is about the…
(Above image: Smiling Francis, by Mic Carlson available on his website.) I find that suffering and joy are not mutually exclusive. They often come bundled together in the same week, month or year. Sometimes even in the same day. The trick is how to hold both well. How do we acknowledge suffering without letting it…
The summer before my life disintegrated was lovely. There are Knoxville summers where the heat oppresses a person like a tyrant, but not that summer. Not the summer of 1997. Highs barely reached to 80 and the humidity must’ve pushed its way around us and into Georgia. I remember being happy, but only as though…
The number of poor has narrowed while the gap between them and the rich has widened. We’ve purchased more guns for protection yet witnessed more homicides. Freedom is our highest value yet we incarcerate more people than anyone else. We have better information yet promote more outlandish conspiracies. We have more friends and followers yet…
I suspect Jesus was a Pharisee. Not in the figurative way we use the word, as in telling someone who says one thing and does the opposite “you’re such a Pharisee.” But I think Jesus literally belonged to the first century Jewish sect of the Pharisees. Think about it. The synagogue was a structure that…