Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.
Category Archive: September 4
Spiritual formation in a Christian tradition answers a specific human question: ‘What kind of person am I going to be?’ It is the process of establishing the character of Christ in the person. That’s all it is.
Death comes not to the living soul, nor age to the loving heart.
The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.
The public school has become the established church of secular society.
When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
One sweetly solemn thought, comes to me o’er and o’er; I am nearer home today, than I ever have been before.
God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character.
There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.
Spiritual formation is character formation. Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.