We wait...not with tapping foot and huffy breath, but we wait with hands open, and hearts willing, to experience the truth of the gospel in our everyday lives.
Father, may we hear your silence as kind company rather than as rejection. May we see our sorrow, our grief, and our difficulties as they are, without trying to extract meaning or closure before their time has come. May we give sadness room to breathe even as we wait for the joy to come.
—Emily P Freeman in The Next Right Thing Podcast Episode 62: Sit Down on the Inside
I was reading Steve Addison’s book... about the markers that create different Christian missionary movements throughout history. The first point is that great movements begin with white hot faith. And what I realized was that we were trying to do a missionary movement at a time when our people were deconstructing ttheir faiths, and their lives were being corroded by this digital capitalist, expressive individual culture.
You can't just send people out into the world unformed, because the world has so much sway and pull and allure to it. First things first, we have to form people, we have to help people actually be with Jesus, be like Jesus, and then go out to do all the things that he was on about...[A pastor used to be able to assume that his people were generally engaging in spiritual disciplines.]... For now all of those assumptions are tuned on their head. For most people, reading the Bible is an uncommon experience. For a lot of young people, the Bible is more of an obstacle to faith rather me than an aid to faith, because of so many questions that our secular world has imported into how we read the Bible, whether it be about Old Testament violence, or sexuality, or the Bible as literature, or critical theory, the way critical theory has shaped the way we read the Bible. And now prayer, I think people just are so distracted. I honestly think that the iPhone is a greater threat to the gospel of Jesus in the West than secularism ever has been or ever will be.
We are called to do the things that have always been done. --- MS or JMC on This Cultural Moment, I believe
