Clergyman

Opposition is an inevitable reality of pastoral life.

Skill at helping people grow spiritually, like skill at playing chess, depends on understanding and valuing differences.

We all want to feel spiritually vigorous, and we hurt when we don't. This pain is intensified for people who lead church ministries.

Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism.

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

A simple way to address hidden curriculum issues is to spend time talking with staff and key leaders about their spiritual lives.

Jesus viewed his own destiny - to be glorified in and through death - as an expression of a kind of cosmic principle: the pathway to life runs through death.

Jesus' life as a foot-washing servant would eventually lead to the adoption of humility as a widely admired virtue.

The church is in the hope business.

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

People cheer the Bible, buy the Bible, give the Bible, own the Bible - they just don't actually read the Bible.

I hate how spiritual formation gets positioned as an optional pursuit for a small special interest group within the church.

There are no clear boundary lines between what is physiological, what is psychological, and what is spiritual. Those are language domains that make sense and have integrity but overlap significantly.

To have my mind racing and my heart beating fast over glorious possibilities is very close to the summit of life experience for me.

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

There are usually multiple messages that could be preached from the same text.

Congregations shaped by the Scriptures generally have preachers who are shaped by the Scriptures.

Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done - like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.

'Amusement' is appealing because we don't have to think; it spares us the fear and anxiety that might otherwise prey on our thoughts.

Authentic spiritual authority is what puts you in touch with reality.