May 2011
4 posts
5 tags
The death of osama bin laden →
Pastor Eugene Cho:
Christians are familiar with another Terrorist – albeit from another time in history.
His name was Saul and he was a persecutor of Christians. He was severely misguided and utterly convicted in his mission in killing Christians. But nevertheless, God had mercy on him and revealed the truth and grace of Christ. It is beyond our rational comprehension. No one is outside of God’s...
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What Forgiveness Is and Isn't →
Michael Washington, my mentor’s co-pastor:
It isn’t forgetting the impact of an offense. This is probably the worst assumption about forgiveness, that it requires us to forget an offense. Further, the assumption is that we stuff our feelings about what happened. It doesn’t. We can no more remove from our hearts and heads yesterday’s pain than we can dismiss the last argument we had...
3 tags
Jon Stewart on photos of Osama Bin Laden →
Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is — and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.
The discussion on forgiveness begins.
1 tag
April 2011
6 posts
3 tags
How could Good Friday ever be good?
I thought that after last night, I should post this. It’s written by a pastor I admire named Eugene Cho.
Today is Good Friday.
Why is it “good?” How could it possibly be good?
In a culture that is ever so quick to get to the product
In a culture that is ever so quick to avoid suffering and pain and seek ways to medicate ourselves to avoid pain
In a culture that is ever so quick to...
4 tags
“Some nights are so rich and good that to try to describe them in words would...”
– Richie, to Sarah, while walking back home after sending everyone off.
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Salvation's purpose
“I’m trying to overcome a typical, wrong, unbiblical attitude on the part of Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, toward this material world.
There’s a tendency for many Christians to think of this material world – the world we’re in now – as a temporary theater for getting saved so that some day you can escape this material world and live happily in heaven forever. An awful lot of...
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Chapter One: Getting Our Story Straight
The action is here.
What implications does this have for your life?
For your future?
For the way you engage and live in the world now?
Because the story begins here,
and the story ends here.
‘May you trust Jesus, when he says that death has been taken care of,
and that you can live forever with God, that you’re never, ever, ever going to stop living.
May you believe that...
3 tags
the rooftop
unfoldingslowly:
Tonight we began something new, something exploratory, something that would not be limited by labels, definitions or existing ideas.
Church has been in the making for two thousand years. In ancient Athens ekklesia was the name given to a particular gathering place where men would assemble to deliberate and vote on political matters. Ekklesia in Greek simply means “called...
It begins.
An excerpt from an email to our youth group, twe12th:
A few months ago I was praying on my rooftop and I felt this strange urge to “start a church” on our rooftop. Of course, a “church” is nothing more than a simple gathering of people who want to grow in God together. It’s not an institution or an organization, but a community. So starting “a church” would be none too different from what...