Jesus, Culture, & Hard Contacts

There is not one Christian interpretation of Jesus; there are many different ones, shaped by different cultures. The church itself is a changing reality, and its confession of the faith has changed and must continue to change. (Newbigin, The Open Secret, p89) This reminds me of the axiom, “Reformed and always reforming.” Our lives and [...]

Continue Reading

Dedicating the Visual Media

From stone tablets to Apple tablets, the Word of God has always been known with whatever technology is available.

From an oral tradition to the incarnation, from parables to epistles, from hand written scrolls to hymns that rip off bar tunes, from Gutenberg’s printing press to google.com. This Word made flesh dwells among us, in the midst of (and sometimes as) our blog posts and status updates and hashtags and push notifications.

Continue Reading

Jesus is a moonwalking bear

The gospel of John opens with its infamous “In the beginning” and concludes with its equally infamous “The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” Yet between these two axioms lies this phrase: He was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. In [...]

Continue Reading

Why does the church calendar follow the life of Christ and leave out the broader story of God, God’s people, and the world?

Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Church. Don’t get me wrong; Jesus is important. But I think the story of God is bigger than these Church seasons lead me to see. While Jesus is the climax of the covenant, we see this story of “God with us” [...]

Continue Reading

Missional Rationale in a Postmodern and Postcolonial World

The World Has Always Been Pluralistic The world has always been pluralistic. Only now we are finally realizing it and encountering it. There has always been a diversity of thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and practices, many of them conflicting. However, moving off of the little house on our quaint prairie, we begin encountering more than simply [...]

Continue Reading

We Live in a Storied Reality

It is not that stories are part of human life, but that human life is part of a story. It is not that there are stories that illustrate “how things are”; it is that we do not begin to understand how things are unless we understand how they were and how they ill be. Our [...]

Continue Reading

My Catholic Roots

Whenever I need centering, whenever I need serene worship, whenever I need anonymity in worship; I run to my roots and head to Catholic Mass. I walk into the doors and my being is literally lifted up as the Cathedral-like sanctuaries invite me in. Saturday night was one of those nights for me. I love [...]

Continue Reading