Congregation Related Quotes

The spiritual differs from the religious in being able to endure isolation. The rank of a spiritual person is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we religious people are constantly in need of ‘the others,’ the herd. We religious folks die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the assembly, of the same opinion as the congregation, and so on. But the Christianity of the New Testament is precisely related to the isolation of the spiritual man.

Because that was the problem, really, wasn’t it, with being human? You couldn’t just be, couldn’t just live and exist without dragging your feet through the mud. You had to communicate, congregate, collaborate, cohabiate. You had to corroborate. Copulate. You had to co-this, co-that, co—bloody-everything, and if you weren’t co-operating you were operating with the co, which was a declaration less of independence than of relativity. You could only really exist in relation to others.

If clergymen knew their congregations as well as physicians do, the sermons would be often more closely related to the parish needs.

People congregate according to their relative levels of luck.

A eulogy is a life lived with a loved one or friend condensed into a few moments relating poignant and witty stories about them to a hushed congregation. The deceased has then an eternity to ponder the remarks with the possibility of spectral visitations to request a retraction.

In short, a spiritual teacher needs to inject conflict into a disciple’s life. Without conflict, we remain at levels of immaturity and don’t grow spiritually. The conflict is likely asking us the question, “When are you going to grow up?” Jesus was consistently challenging his disciples by confronting them with their levels of immaturity. Within congregational life, there needs to be a kind of psychological contract between pastor and people that “sometimes I’m going to make you quite uncomfortable in my sermons and in my personal conversations with you.” We should not accept spiritual messages that just always make us feel good about ourselves—a feel-good gospel. That is going to keep us stuck at immature levels of self-insight. In order for congregations to grow, both numerically and spiritually, we will need to experience conflict at all levels of congregational life.

The hard and necessary work of reconciliation, peacemaking, relational perseverance, and loving the unlovely is not something we generally gravitate to on our own or when we are creating a personal, custom-made spiritual experience. We need the inconvenient and costly demands of congregational living to shape that kind of love.

The Christian’s life in all its aspects—intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness—is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it. So apart from him, not only will there be no lively believers and no lively congregations, there will be no believers and no congregations at all. -J. I. Packer-

Stanley Goldfarb died and his relatives and the congregation gathered for an evening of prayers and mourning. When the time came for the mourners to come up and eulogize him, no one stirred. After several minutes, the rabbi was getting anxious. “Someone must have something nice to say about him,” he implored. More silence. Finally a voice piped up from the back of the room: “His brother was worse.

Beyond the family or particular Christian tradition, how much effort do we make to consider what the Mennonites or the Episcopalians, the Baptists or the Pentecostals, the Methodists or the Presbyterians have to say to the rest of us out of their DIFFERENCES, as well as out of the affirmation in common with other Christians? As I suggested earlier, our patterns of ecumenicity tend to bracket out our differences rather than to celebrate and capitalize upon them. Finding common ground has been the necessary first step in ecumenical relations and activity. But the next step is to acknowledge and enjoy what God has done elsewhere in the Body of Christ. And if at the congregational level we are willing to say, 'I can't do everything myself, for I am an ear: I must consult with a hand or an eye on this matter,' I suggest that we do the same among whole traditions. If we do not regularly and programmatically consult with each other, we are tacitly claiming that we have no need of each other, and that all the truth, beauty, and goodness we need has been vouchsafed to us by God already. Not only is such an attitude problematic in terms of our flourishing, as I have asserted, but in this context now we must recognize how useless a picture this presents to the rest of society. Baptists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics failing to celebrate diversity provide no positive examples to societies trying to understand how to celebrate diversity on larger scales.

Can it be that there is anything of more consequence in life than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age? Surely, we say, it is better to go by steam than to go afoot, because we reach our destination sooner—getting there quickly being a supreme object. It is well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold, to congregate men in masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal

I will say you've shown up what thin stuff clergymen were peddling, most of them. When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they're finding out--most of them--that what's left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway.

Idolatry divides Christianity into a shopping mall of sects, each selling their own unique god package. Churches become like stores displaying their relevant music or practical teaching like sexily shaped mannequins. Churches advertise and put on great Sunday matinee shows to attract new customers, competing with other churches for congregants like other corporations compete for clients. This is what happens when faith becomes a set of concepts rather than a relational way of living. A concept makes a better product than a relationship.

Are the religious individuals in a society more moral than the secular ones? Many researchers have looked into this, and the main finding is that there are few interesting findings. There are subtle effects here and there: some studies find, for instance, that the religious are slightly more prejudiced, but this effect is weak when one factors out other considerations, such as age and political attitudes, and exists only when religious belief is measured in certain ways. The only large effect is that religious Americans give more to charity (including nonreligious charities) than atheists do. This holds even when one controls for demographics (religious Americans are more likely than average to be older, female, southern, and African American). To explore why this relationship exists, the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell asked people about life after death, the importance of God to morality, and various other facets of religious belief. It turns out that none of their answers to such questions were related to behaviors having to do with volunteering and charitable giving. Rather, participation in the religious community was everything. As Putnam and Campbell put it, “Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness.… In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.” This importance of community, and the irrelevance of belief, extends as well to the nastier effects of religion. The psychologist Jeremy Ginges and his colleagues found a strong relationship between religiosity and support for suicide bombing among Palestinian Muslims, and, again, the key factor was religious community, not religious belief: mosque attendance predicted support for suicide attacks; frequency of prayer did not. Among Indonesian Muslims, Mexican Catholics, British Protestants, Russian Orthodox in Russia, Israeli Jews, and Indian Hindus, frequency of religious attendance (but again, not frequency of prayer) predicts responses to questions such as “I blame people of other religions for much of the trouble in this world.

Ruth and I often share the stories that we have heard and the things that we have learned to help the western church and many of its congregations grasp a new, and perhaps more biblical, perspective on suffering and persecution in our faith. We share often about how suffering and persecution relate to our faith. We desperately want our western brothers and sisters in Christ to realize that the greatest enemy of our faith today is not communism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Atheism, or even Islam. Our greatest enemy is lostness. Lostness is the terrible enemy that Jesus commissioned His followers to vanquish with the battle strategy that He spelled out for them in Matthew 28:18-20. He was addressing this same enemy when He plainly clarified His purpose in coming: 'I have come to seek and to save those who are lost.' Our hope is that believers around the world will get close enough to the heart of God that the first images that come to mind when we heard the word 'Muslim' are not Somali pirates or suicide bombers or violent jihadists or even terrorists. When we hear the word 'Muslim,' we need to see and think of each and every individual Muslim as a lost person who is loved by God. We need to see each Muslim as a person in need of God's grace and forgiveness. We need to see each Muslim as someone for whom Christ died.

A while back a young woman from another state came to live with some of her relatives in the Salt Lake City area for a few weeks. On her first Sunday she came to church dressed in a simple, nice blouse and knee-length skirt set off with a light, button-up sweater. She wore hose and dress shoes, and her hair was combed simply but with care. Her overall appearance created an impression of youthful grace. Unfortunately, she immediately felt out of place. It seemed like all the other young women her age or near her age were dressed in casual skirts, some rather distant from the knee; tight T-shirt-like tops that barely met the top of their skirts at the waist (some bare instead of barely); no socks or stockings; and clunky sneakers or flip-flops. One would have hoped that seeing the new girl, the other girls would have realized how inappropriate their manner of dress was for a chapel and for the Sabbath day and immediately changed for the better. Sad to say, however, they did not, and it was the visitor who, in order to fit in, adopted the fashion (if you can call it that) of her host ward. It is troubling to see this growing trend that is not limited to young women but extends to older women, to men, and to young men as well. . . . I was shocked to see what the people of this other congregation wore to church. There was not a suit or tie among the men. They appeared to have come from or to be on their way to the golf course. It was hard to spot a woman wearing a dress or anything other than very casual pants or even shorts. Had I not known that they were coming to the school for church meetings, I would have assumed that there was some kind of sporting event taking place. The dress of our ward members compared very favorably to this bad example, but I am beginning to think that we are no longer quite so different as more and more we seem to slide toward that lower standard. We used to use the phrase “Sunday best.” People understood that to mean the nicest clothes they had. The specific clothing would vary according to different cultures and economic circumstances, but it would be their best. It is an affront to God to come into His house, especially on His holy day, not groomed and dressed in the most careful and modest manner that our circumstances permit. Where a poor member from the hills of Peru must ford a river to get to church, the Lord surely will not be offended by the stain of muddy water on his white shirt. But how can God not be pained at the sight of one who, with all the clothes he needs and more and with easy access to the chapel, nevertheless appears in church in rumpled cargo pants and a T-shirt? Ironically, it has been my experience as I travel around the world that members of the Church with the least means somehow find a way to arrive at Sabbath meetings neatly dressed in clean, nice clothes, the best they have, while those who have more than enough are the ones who may appear in casual, even slovenly clothing. Some say dress and hair don’t matter—it’s what’s inside that counts. I believe that truly it is what’s inside a person that counts, but that’s what worries me. Casual dress at holy places and events is a message about what is inside a person. It may be pride or rebellion or something else, but at a minimum it says, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand the difference between the sacred and the profane.” In that condition they are easily drawn away from the Lord. They do not appreciate the value of what they have. I worry about them. Unless they can gain some understanding and capture some feeling for sacred things, they are at risk of eventually losing all that matters most. You are Saints of the great latter-day dispensation—look the part.

As the service proceeded, the clergyman drew such pictures of the graces, the winning ways, and the rare promise of the lost lads that every soul there, thinking he recognized these pictures, felt a pang in remembering that he had persistently blinded himself to them always before, and had as persistently seen only faults and flaws in the poor boys. The minister related many a touching incident in the lives of the departed, too, which illustrated their sweet, generous natures, and the people could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those episodes were, and remembered with grief that at the time they occurred they had seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide. The congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs, the preacher himself giving way to his feelings, and crying in the pulpit.

In our society today, much is made of treating children as persons, human beings who have a right to be heard. But many family leaders today bend so far in the direction of consensus, in order to avoid the stigma of being authoritarian, that clarity of values and the positive, often crucial benefits of the leader's self-differentiation are almost totally missing from the system. One of the most prevalent characteristics of families with disturbed children is the absence or the involution of the relational hierarchy. While schools of family therapy have different ways of conceptualizing this condition, which may also be viewed as a political phenomenon regarding congregations, it is so diffuse among families troubled by their troubled children that its importance cannot be underestimated. What happens in any type of family system regarding leadership is paradoxical. The same interdependency that creates a need for leadership makes the followers anxious and reactive precisely when the leader is functioning best.

Too many preachers have been like the cowed Israelites across the valley from Goliath, trembling at the reverberations of his authoritative voice. There have been, however, praise God, many Davids . . . who have picked up five smooth stones known as facts and hurled them with deadly aim and effect.4 He was delighted to see that his homiletic mentor confronted the issue of race: Jesus’ most effective sermon on race relations was not really a discourse on that subject at all. It was the parable of the Good Samaritan . . . the hero was a despised and unjustly treated member of another race, a Samaritan. That is indirect and superb preaching on appreciating and honoring other racial groups. Jesus did not make a frontal attack; he made a strategic flank movement. So a preacher often gets farther into the minds of his congregation, not by announcing and preaching another sermon on the Negro problem, but by using, as an illustration in his sermon on courage, a Negro performing an act of great courage. He will not have to look far for that!5

So who is out there? The preacher addresses people with layers and layers of alienation that result from sin and that are experienced as guilt. The gathered congregation includes those who are profoundly burdened with guilt, whose lives are framed by deep wrong, by skewed relations beyond resolve, shareholders in the public drama of brutality and exploitation. There is a heaviness, and pious good humor is not an adequate response. The heaviness is poorly matched by yearning, but there is a yearning nonetheless. It is the resilience of the yearning that causes people to dress up in their heaviness and present themselves for the drama one more time. Sunday morning is, for some, a last, desperate hope that life need not be lived in alienation. We need not dwell on the sin that produces alienation. Suffice with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to say that sin characteristically is manifested in distorted relations to sex and money, in lust and in greed, in abuse of neighbor and in the squandering of creation. As the guilt emerges, alienation lingers. And the desperation resulting from the alienation lingers even more powerfully.

The central ceremony of Ritual Witchcraft was the so-called "Sabbath" - a word of unknown origin having no relation to its Hebrew homonym. Sabbaths were celebrated four times a year - on Candlemass Day, February 2nd, on Rood Mass Day, May 1st, on Lammas Day, August 1st, and on the eve of All Hallows, October 31st. These were great festivals, often attended by hundreds of devotees, who came from considerable distances. Between Sabbaths there were weekly "Esbats" from small congregations in the village where the ancient religion was still practiced. At all high Sabbaths the devil himself was invariably present, in the person of some man who had inherited, or otherwise acquired, the honor of being the incarnation of the two-faced god of the Dianic cult. The worshipers paid homage to the god by kissing his reverse face - a mask worn, beneath an animal's tail, on the devil's backside. There was then, for some at least of the female devotees, a ritual copulation with the god, who was equipped for this purpose with an artificial phallus of horn or metal. This ceremony was followed by a picnic (for the Sabbaths were celebrated out of doors, near sacred trees or stones), by dancing and finally by a promiscuous sexual orgy that had, no doubt, originally been a magical operation for increasing the fertility of the animals on which primitive hunters and herdsmen depend for their livelihood. The prevailing atmosphere at the Sabbaths was one of good fellowship and mindless, animal joy. When captured and brought to trial, many of the who had taken part in the Sabbath resolutely refused, even under torture, even at the stake, to abjure the religion which had brought them so much happiness.

Type II trauma also often occurs within a closed context - such as a family, a religious group, a workplace, a chain of command, or a battle group - usually perpetrated by someone related or known to the victim. As such, it often involves fundamental betrayal of the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator and within the community (Freyd, 1994). It may also involve the betrayal of a particular role and the responsibility associated with the relationship (i.e., parent-child, family member-child, therapist-client, teacher-student, clergy-child/adult congregant, supervisor-employee, military officer-enlisted man or woman). Relational dynamics of this sort have the effect of further complicating the victim's survival adaptations, especially when a superficially caring, loving or seductive relationship is cultivated with the victim (e.g., by an adult mentor such as a priest, coach, or teacher; by an adult who offers a child special favors for compliance; by a superior who acts as a protector or who can offer special favors and career advancement). In a process labelled "selection and grooming", potential abusers seek out as potential victims those who appear insecure, are needy and without resources, and are isolated from others or are obviously neglected by caregivers or those who are in crisis or distress for which they are seeking assistance. This status is then used against the victim to seduce, coerce, and exploit. Such a scenario can lead to trauma bonding between victim and perpetrator (i.e., the development of an attachment bond based on the traumatic relationship and the physical and social contact), creating additional distress and confusion for the victim who takes on the responsibility and guilt for what transpired, often with the encouragement or insinuation of the perpetrator(s) to do so.

The experience of the common worship of God is such a moment. It is in this connection that American Christianity has betrayed the religion of Jesus almost beyond redemption. Churches have been established for the underprivileged, for the weak, for the poor, on the theory that they prefer to be among themselves. Churches have been established for the Chinese, the Japanese, the Korean, the Mexican, the Filipino, the Italian, and the Negro, with the same theory in mind. The result is that in the one place in which normal, free contacts might be most naturally established—in which the relations of the individual to his God should take priority over conditions of class, race, power, status, wealth, or the like—this place is one of the chief instruments for guaranteeing barriers. It is in order to quote these paragraphs from a recently published book, The Protestant Church and the Negro, by Frank S. Loescher: There are approximately 8,000,000 Protestant Negroes. About 7,500,000 are in separate Negro denominations. Therefore, from the local church through the regional organizations to the national assemblies over 93 per cent of the Negroes are without association in work and worship with Christians of other races except in interdenominational organizations which involves a few of their leaders. The remaining 500,000 Negro Protestants—about 6 per cent—are in predominantly white denominations, and of these 500,000 Negroes in “white” churches, at least 99 per cent, judging by the surveys of six denominations, are in segregated congregations. They are in association with their white denominational brothers only in national assemblies, and, in some denominations, in regional, state, or more local jurisdictional meetings. There remains a handful of Negro members in local “white” churches. How many? Call it one-tenth of one per cent of all the Negro Protestant Christians in the United States—8,000 souls—the figure is probably much too large. Whatever the figure actually is, the number of white and Negro persons who ever gather together for worship under the auspices of Protestant Christianity is almost microscopic. And where interracial worship does occur, it is, for the most part, in communities where there are only a few Negro families and where, therefore, only a few Negro individuals are available to “white” churches. That is the over-all picture, a picture which hardly reveals the Protestant church as a dynamic agency in the integration of American Negroes into American life. Negro membership appears to be confined to less than one per cent of the local “white” churches, usually churches in small communities where but a few Negroes live and have already experienced a high degree of integration by other community institutions—communities one might add where it is unsound to establish a Negro church since Negroes are in such small numbers. It is an even smaller percentage of white churches in which Negroes are reported to be participating freely, or are integrated

We don’t grow and mature in our Christian life by sitting in a classroom and library, listening to lectures and reading books, or going to church and singing hymns and listening to sermons. We do it by taking the stuff of our ordinary lives, our parents and children, our spouses and friends, our workplaces and fellow workers, our dreams and fantasies, our attachments, our easily accessible gratifications, our depersonalizing of intimate relations, our commodification of living truths into idolatries, taking all this and placing it on the altar of refining fire—our God is a consuming fire—and finding it all stuff redeemed for a life of holiness. A life that is not reserved for nuns and monks but accessible to every Dick and Jane in every ordinary congregation.

A lot of Christian creatives are skeptical of other Christians, too. Many creative believers we’ve talked to feel undervalued in the church, so much so that the church no longer feels like home for them. It seems the only time the church needs them is when they want someone “artsy” to decorate the sanctuary for the Christmas Spectacular, or when they need a “creative” to be onstage to show the congregation that they can “relate” to the culture and appeal to those “other” generations.

A homogenous, hand-picked congregation where people are mutually conformable in all their minor social ways is agreeable. It makes parish life smoother. But to require such conformity is entirely un-Catholic; it is contrary not only to the spirit of the Catholic Church in general, but to the tradition of the Catholic Church in the United States.

The prophet Jeremiah (chap. xxv. 3), puts the people in mind how long he had labored among them in the work of the ministry: “From the thirteenth year of Josiah the son of Amon king of Judah, even unto this day, that is the three and twentieth year, the word of the Lord came unto me, and I have spoken unto you, rising early and speaking.” I am not about to compare myself with the prophet Jeremiah; but in this respect I can say as he did, that “I have spoken the word of God to you unto the three and twentieth year, rising early and speaking.” It was three and twenty years, the 15th day of last February, since I have labored in the work of the ministry, in the relation of a pastor to this church and congregation.

He often chooses to lead us deeper into this knowledge by putting His favor on individuals that we would never have thought of as ideal candidates. It’s our job to learn that this is one of His ways. We need to humble ourselves and learn to recognize the favor of God wherever it rests. As a pastor I sometimes invite speakers who come in a rough package but carry a great anointing. I do this to train my congregation to recognize the anointing and to celebrate who people are, not who they aren’t. People want to be doctrinally safe, not relationally safe.

While the governor rejected the petitioners, it wasn’t the whole truth. As in Amsterdam, there were restrictions: Jews were not allowed to hold government office, hold religious services in public, or take a Christian lover.18 But, again, these restrictions were relatively minor in the seventeenth-century Diaspora world. The People of the Book might be despised, but those in Brazil had fundamental rights. More important, they were needed. They called their congregation Zur Israel, Rock of Israel—a pun on Recife, which means “rock of Brazil.

Riotte fought to keep the Zeitung and free-state effort alive, but like Douai he was worn down by foes who "vomit fire and poison against me." Rather than "act the part of Sisiphus," he planned to found a new German colony in northern Mexico to "build up a more solid wall against slavery" than was possible in the US, In his letters to Olmsted, Riotte also delineated, with keen transatlantic insight, a divide that he felt had doomed their efforts from the start. "We are judged from the standpoint of an American-indeed a very strange people!" he wrote. Riotte and his ilk viewed society "as a congregation of men, whose aim it is to elevate the wellbeing of the aggregate by the combined exertion." Americans, by contrast, "look first upon themselves as private individuals, entitled to ask for all the rights and benefits of an organized community even to the detriment of the whole.... We idealize the community-you the individual! How is it possible, that we ever should amalgamate?" Riotte closed by praising Olmsted's writing on the South but expressed doubt that it would diminish the Slave Power. "I don't know of any historical record of an Aristocracy giving up their privileges, except in the case of revolutionary pressure.

Concerning the content of the message itself, one must determine first whether the preacher has understood the text and grasped his subject. A biblical preacher must not only comprehend the broad purpose of his text, as well as other insights available about the text, but he must also have a sufficient theological comprehension and an above-average grasp of the Bible as a whole to set his text properly in the theological milieu. Great preachers are cognizant of the necessity to be able to do exegesis and exposition within a historical setting of which they are constantly aware. How little actual grasp of scriptural knowledge is present in most North American preachers is reflected in the relative biblical illiteracy and theological misapprehensions of most congregations.

One of the dangers against which I warn aspiring preachers in our seminary is that of preaching against all the sins with which no one in their congregation struggles. It is relatively easy to warn the heterosexuals about the dangers of homosexuality, the teetotaler about the snare of alcoholism, the politically conservative about the hazards of liberalism, the rigidly orthodox about the perils of false teaching. All

we begin to recognize how we accidentally or deliberately trespass the boundaries of others. We do this when: • We do for others what they can and should do for themselves • We demand that others conform to our way of thinking, instead of valuing both our similarities and our differences • We consistently try to argue others out of their opinions or feelings • We take responsibility for the feelings or decisions of others • We try to control the behavior or responses of others (even when it is for their own good!) Likewise, we respect the boundaries of our family members and our congregation when we: • Agree to disagree and then move on • Clearly communicate our own position while allowing others to do the same • Take responsibility for our own ideas and decisions • Welcome how others differ from us, seeking to learn from them • Say no and set limits when appropriate • Take care of our own needs whenever possible, without coercing others to take care of us When we are clear about our own boundaries, we choose what we believe to be best for ourselves, our family, and our congregation without succumbing to the pressure of anxiety. We make decisions about family life on the basis of what is best for the family, not the preferences or expectations of the church. As a family, we seek to relate to the congregation as individuals with unique gifts and values rather than as a collective unit.

This adaptive capacity is the crucial leadership element for a changing world (see fig. 7.1). While it is grounded on the professional credibility that comes from technical competence and the trust gained through relational congruence, adaptive capacity is also its own set of skills to be mastered. These skills include the capacity to calmly face the unknown to refuse quick fixes to engage others in the learning and transformation necessary to take on the challenge that is before them to seek new perspectives to ask questions that reveal competing values and gaps in values and actions to raise up the deeper issues at work in a community to explore and confront resistance and sabotage to learn and change without sacrificing personal or organizational fidelity to act politically and stay connected relationally to help the congregation make hard, often painful decisions to effectively fulfill their mission in a changing context This capacity building is more than just some techniques to master. It’s a set of deeply developed capabilities that are the result of ongoing transformation in the life of a leader.

action. We must discover the patterns, customs, and even the habits around which they organize their lives. If we look at them and see only our own reflection, we do not know them. If we look at them and see only an “other,” an object of our scrutiny, we do not know them. Only when we know who they are with us can we claim really to know them. An exegetical process introduces us to the text. It provides some crucial biographical information, and it even discloses some of the text’s secrets. It is up to the preacher, then, to bring the life of the congregation into the text’s presence, to dwell there long and prayerfully, and to discern the reality of this text as it is with us. This is eventful. Something happens between text and people: a claim is made, a voice is heard, a textual will is exerted, and the sermon will be a bearing witness to this event. As the final step in the exegetical process, the preacher throws the first cord across the gap between text and sermon by describing the text’s claim upon the hearers, including the preacher. We are ready to move on to the creation of the sermon itself only when we can finish the following sentence: “In relation

In chapter V of the first Epistle of St. John, these words strike the visitor, "There are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, and the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are One." If these two verses are authentic, they would be an affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity, dating from the first century, at a time when the Gospels, the Acts, and St. Paul ignore it. It was first pointed out in 1806 that these verses were an interpolation, for they do not appear in the best manuscripts, notably all the Greek manuscripts down to the fifteenth century. The Roman Church refused to bow to evidence. The Congregation of the Index, on January 13, 1897, with the approbation of Leo XIII, forbade any question as to the authenticity of the text relating to the "three heavenly witnesses.

Ekklesia was a common term used in Greek cities for assembling citizens together, often to render decisions related to public The words synagogue (sunagoge) and congregation (qahal) were the more common words used by Jews to describe their religious gatherings for prayer, worship, and exhortation. Jesus could have called His followers into a new synagogue or some other adaptation of a preexisting Jewish term. Instead, Jesus used a word that implied a public gathering for everyone, Jew and Gentile. The word church thrusts us into the public arena. The followers of Jesus could have avoided persecution by remaining within Judaism, which enjoyed a protected status as a cultus privatus (private cult) within the empire. The word synagogue referred to a religious community that had withdrawn from the world, whereas the word church refers to a public gathering of people at the center of society.

the success of social media must be understood partly in relation to this shrinking social landscape. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are not only new public spaces: they are in many cases the only “public” spaces in which teens can easily congregate with large groups of their peers. More significantly, teens can gather in them while still physically stuck at home.

In the context of our particular family or group or congregation, to present the kingdom of the heavens will mean that we must teach about the nature of belief (which is the same as faith) and how it relates to the rest of our personality. And then we must study our friends and associates to see what they really do believe and help them to be honest about it. We understand that our beliefs are the rails upon which our life runs, and so we have to address their actual beliefs and their doubts, not spend our time discussing many fine things that have little or no relevance to their genuine state of mind.12 Then we must be very fair and thorough in examining those beliefs and considering to what extent they are or are not justified. There must not be the least effort to be unfair in this examination or to pooh-pooh genuine problems, for that will weaken and infect everything we try to develop thereafter. One cannot build discipleship to Jesus by dodging serious issues or not doing justice to honest doubts about him and his teachings.

The more a congregation considers its people customers, the more likely it is to develop a broader range of ministries to relate to varying needs, interests and priorities.

The sequel, however, must be given, or our purpose in relating the incident will be defeated. When Mr. Moody preached at the morning service there was a woman in the congregation who had an invalid sister. On her return home she told the invalid that the preacher had been a Mr. Moody from Chicago, and on hearing this she turned pale. “What,” she said, “Mr. Moody from Chicago l I read about him some time ago in an American paper, and I have been praying God to send him to London, and to our church. If I had known he was going to preach this morning I would have eaten no breakfast. I would have spent the whole time in prayer. Now, sister, go out of the room, lock the door, send me no dinner; no matter who comes, don’t let them see me. I am going to spend the whole afternoon in prayer.” And so while Mr. Moody stood in the pulpit that had been like an ice-chamber in the morning, the bedridden saint was holding him up before God, and God, who ever delights to answer prayer, poured out His Spirit in mighty power.

A replant is more closely related to church planting than to revitalization. In revitalization, some aspects of the previous church exist in the new emerging entity. In many replants, the old identity is lost, a new identity is established, and the old church property may be repurposed for a new mission work. This is certainly superior to the closing and selling of the church property. However, replanting is basically a new work using the resources of an older church to accomplish a new vision with a new congregation.

begged forgiveness of those whose relatives she had caused to be arrested or accused. She profoundly regretted the calamity she had caused. In particular she apologized to the Nurse, Esty, and Cloyce families, their ranks thin in the village pews by 1706. They were innocent. She twice reminded the congregation that she had acted in concert “with others.” Whoever drafted her statement had the jurors’ apology before him; as had they, Ann declared she had acted “ignorantly and unwittingly.” She too had been neither able “to understand, nor able to withstand, the mysterious delusions of the powers of darkness and Prince of the air.” Three times in her short statement she notes she had been an “instrument” in his designs.

Everyone needs a family. Human well-being is related to the reality of human relationships, not to wealth and possessions.20 People don’t do well in massed groups—except to make themselves more easily the victims of manipulation. They thrive best in communities where the individual is the principal concern. What then is the responsibility of the church? Clearly Evangelicals have to do something drastic both within their own constituency (how they carry out church) and within society at large (by creating vibrant communities open to all). People, not programs, have to become their central priority. And because larger and ever more homogenous congregations are opposed to this project, they must be downsized and personalized. More than that, the church has to apply its biblical insights and, by example, change the culture itself, holding out another ideal to emulate, offering a different idea of what community is actually like.

VPs of Administration and Finance represent the interests of that business vertical. They are also strongly partial to the systems used by that business vertical. For example, within a medical university, they cannot be expected to also represent marketing; advancement; communications; business development; client relations; disease control; provost; faculty; student life; or other departments. Think about your enterprise: How can the person overseeing finance be impartial or well-informed across all your departments? Under many organizations' reporting structures, the CIO is expected to develop relationships with these other business verticals, but since they report to the CFO they are excluded from the very cabinet meetings where leaders congregate. Even when CIOs are invited, they are not considered of equal rank -- because they are not. Everyone views the CFO as the final authority for IT decisions, leading to some serious problems. In these organizations, finance drives strategy instead of strategy driving finance. IT is seen as a cost center and there is a perennial pressure to cut costs and reduce expenditures -- often at the detriment of strategy. Cybersecurity may be non-existent in these organizations. Setting appropriate salaries for CIOs and people reporting to the CIOs becomes impossible.

When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they're finding out - most of them - that what's left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway.

We can also learn to develop a new capacity for seeing the nervous water of an emotional process (a coach or a guide like Kenny is helpful). It requires some new categories for thinking; it means practicing some new disciplines and skills. It entails change in how we relate to others, and it demands time and patience. But leadership in the kingdom of God is worth the effort.

The Sunday school is also a relatively recent invention, born some 1,700 years after Christ. A newspaper publisher named Robert Raikes (1736-1811) from Britain is credited with being its founder. In 1780, Raikes established a school in "South Alley" for poor children. Raikes did not begin the Sunday school for the purpose of religious instruction. Instead, he founded it to teach poor children the basics of education. The Sunday school took off like wildfire, spreading to Baptist, Congregational, and Methodist churches throughout England.

A congregation that is not growing is dying. However, growth won’t necessarily be reflected numerically. It doesn’t have to involve more bodies in worship or in membership, or more dollars in the budget. It should involve growth related to the congregation’s proximate purpose: deepening spiritual practices, integrating kids with special needs into the life of the congregation, strengthening intergenerational connections, and the like. A leader trying to move an organization away from general aspirations about growth, toward a more specific purpose, can ask these questions. Growth to what end; what will growth accomplish that is central to our mission? Who will benefit from growth? Is growth possible or even desirable? Where will growth come from?[14]

In and through this relational existence we come to know God as love and come to understand the Christian call to “love one another.” This love is not a warm feeling, although it may include that; it is active and participatory engagement in the whole of life of other persons and of the global society. It involves individual healing and social justice making.

Suppose a bhikṣu, a bhikṣuṇī, an upāsaka, an upāsikā, or some other wise person, whether young or old, rejoices at hearing this sūtra in a congregation after my extinction. After leaving the congregation, he or she goes to some other place, for instance, to a monastery, a retired place, a city, a street, a town, or a village. There he or she expounds this sūtra, as he or she has heard it, to his or her father, mother, relative, friend or acquaintance as far as he or she can.

You speak like a future nation-builder, Master Shevki. Dede has no relationship with the nation. His domain is the soul of the individual … a soul that has curiosities, enigmas, hunger, thirst particular to itself. Whether or not men are composed of small pieces of an apparent nation like some type of world-womb, they return naked to the congregation. Dede has no relation with the future Turkish regime that you have imagined.

That’s pretty strong. I will say you’ve shown up what thin stuff clergymen were peddling, most of them. When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they’re finding out—most of them—that what’s left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway. My glass is empty.” Lasher sighed. “What do you expect?” he said. “For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men—and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell. My glass is empty.

The former medical director of Planned Parenthood, Calderone had come up with the idea for her organization, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, at a 1961 conference of the National Association of Churches. By the 1964–65 school year SIECUS’s “Guidelines for Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade” had been requested by over a thousand school districts. A typical exercise for kindergarten was watching eggs hatch in an incubator. Her supporters saw themselves as the opposite of subversives. “The churches have to take the lead,” Dr. Calderone, herself a Quaker, would say, “home, school, church, and community all working cooperatively.” The American Medical Association, the National Education Association, and the American Association of School Administrators all published resolutions in support of the vision. Her theory was that citizens would be more sexually responsible if they learned the facts of life frankly and in the open, otherwise the vacuum would be filled by the kind of talk that children picked up in the streets. An Illinois school district argued that her program would fight “‘situation ethics’ and an emerging, but not yet widely accepted standard of premarital sex.” Even Billy Graham’s magazine, Christianity Today, gave the movement a cautious seal of approval. They didn’t see it as “liberal.” But it was liberal. The SIECUS curriculum encouraged children to ask questions. In her speeches Calderone said her favorite four-letter word ended with a k: T-A-L-K. She advised ministers to tell congregants who asked them about premarital sex, “Nobody can judge that but yourself, but here are the facts about it.” She taught that people “are being moral when they are being true to themselves,” that “it’s the highest morality to live up to the best in yourself, whether you call it God or whatever.” Which, simply, was a subversive message to those who believed such judgments came from God—or at least from parental authority. The anti-sex-education movement was also intimately related to a crusade against “sensitivity training”: children talking about their feelings, about their home lives, another pollution of prerogatives that properly belonged to family and church. “SOCIALISTS USE SEX WEDGE in Public School to Separate Children from Parental Authority,” one of their pamphlets put it. Maybe not socialists, but at the very least someone was separating children from parental authority. More and more, it looked like the Establishment. And, given that the explosion issued from liberals obliviously blundering into the most explosive questions of where moral authority came from, thinking themselves advancing an unquestionable moral good, it is appropriate that the powder keg came in one of America’s most conservative suburbs: Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, in Orange County, California, where officials had, ironically enough, established a pioneering flagship sex education program four years earlier.

Through identifying the effects of women’s systemic objectification as some sort of vagina-supremacist witchcraft, the men that congregated on 4chan gained an identity, and a useful common enemy. Many of these men had, likely, experienced consequences related to the “liberal intellectual conformity” that is popular feminism: as the sexual marketplace began to equalize, they suddenly found themselves unable to obtain sex by default. Rather than work toward other forms of self-actualization—or attempt to make themselves genuinely desirable, in the same way that women have been socialized to do at great expense and with great sincerity for all time—they established a group identity that centered on anti-woman virulence, on telling women who happened to stumble across 4chan that “the only interesting thing about you is your naked body. tl;dr: tits or GET THE FUCK OUT.

So what about our congregations and the way we relate to the world has left us completely ill equipped to call out this sort of radical evil as it festers in our pews? What are we doing to equip our members to engage with their families and the broader community? How are we training them to start to talk these folks back from the edge of the abyss?

Before starting work on being more mature it’s worth being aware that it’s possible to achieve a fake kind of maturity in relationships. All of us have some degree of pretend maturity in our repartee of relating. We’re prone to doing a patch-up job on the immaturity blocks we inherit from the generations of our families’ anxious sensitivities so that they’re hidden from view as much as possible. Any patching up we do can make us look pretty impressive at times as we switch on our most confident persona. This counterfeit type of maturity is not always unhelpful as it enables us to rise to many challenges in life and cope beyond our usual capacities. This “winging it” kind of maturity can be an adaptive advantage, but it can also be a bit of a trap in giving us an inflated view of our maturity.1

Then, in some circumstances, the public ministry and many related duties for edifying and strengthening the congregation may have outgrown the gifts and abilities of a pastor, rendering him no longer competent to serve the pastorate where he was called years ago. He cannot cope, and continuing is a struggle. Still, authorities should not act hastily. Before reaching a point when demands of the ministry severely outweigh competencies, a pastor will assess the situation. Perhaps he may request and accept assistance that would bring strength to his pastoral ministry. Or he may seek another ministry and consider another Call.

The noise of the street rose, many-voiced, in the music of congregation. Acquaintances were mutual and threw a wide ambit; besides neighbors and relations immediate, there were cousins, cousins of cousins, cousins of neighbors, cousins of neighbors' cousins, and their cousins, and their neighbors, all of which proved blood was a river without beginning or end.

was locking up at the local mosque for which I am a trustee when an elderly frail gentleman approached me and quietly asked if I could help raise money to repair the roof of the local synagogue. He went on to explain that he was one of only 200 Jews left in Bradford and there was only one old and small synagogue standing in the city which needed repairs as the roof was leaking badly. The small Jewish community he went on to say was not wealthy but was trying to raise funds for the repair. I was taken aback at a Jewish man approaching a mosque to help repair a synagogue. I responded that I would like to visit the synagogue to see what needed doing which I did the next day to find the roof was indeed in bad shape with buckets kept in various places in the prayer area to catch the leaks. The following Friday before Friday prayers I briefed the Imam who leads the prayers with this story who recounted it to the congregation attending Friday prayers and to my surprise £130,000 in donations was raised from two weekly Friday prayers supported with a few significant value donations from local Pakistani businessmen. The funds were used not just to renovate the roof but to carry out badly needed structural repairs and repaint the entire synagogue. The letters of thanks from the Jewish community were touching and were posted on the mosque notice boards. There is a significant proportion of the 200 Jews in the city now attending our Eid gatherings at the mosque to have a meal together and join in Eid celebrations and similarly Muslims from the mosque visit the synagogue on Jewish celebratory days.” I asked if this beautiful incident of religious tolerance had been covered in the press. “The mainstream media looks for sensational stories more than such human stories, maligning the Muslim community without broadcasting the good progress being made on inter-faith relations and integration.