Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an 'outer you' that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an 'inner you.' You have a spirit.
When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.
The toppling of idols - even respectable, admired, best-practice, fastest-growing idols - is always the road to liberation.
Better to be a loving person without knowing how you got there, than an expert no one can stand to be around.
Far more books get written about how to get more people in your church than how to get the people already in your church to have more humility and sincere love.
Universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard all began as Jesus-inspired efforts to love God with all ones' mind.
No one wants pain. Not even long-time, mature Christians who want to grow. We will always find ways to avoid pain. Pain itself is a bad thing.
There are dozens of references to God in the Scriptures for every one to the figure of Satan. This reflects a sometimes forgotten theological truth that the devil is by no means God's counterpart. He is a creature, not the Creator.
The New Testament doesn't present Jesus as a single man to cover up his humanity. It presents him as a single man because... he was a single man.
Tithing is like training wheels when it comes to giving. It's intended to help you get started, but not recommended for the Tour de France.
My main job is to live with deep contentment, joy, and confidence in my everyday experience of life with God. Everything else is job number two.
In the context of worship, amusement is a waste of time and a waste of life, and therefore a form of sin.
Although the church has often been far too slow to follow his lead, Jesus' insistence that women, as well as men, bear the full image of God has had a way of sparking reform movements across the centuries.
The question isn't if someone will sign up for spiritual formation; it's just who and what our spirits will be formed by.
Prudence is not the same thing as caution. Caution is a helpful strategy when you're crossing a minefield; it's a disaster when you're in a gold rush.