For me, the scariest worship service is one where the congregation waits on God alone to speak and act. The minutes pass, and you can’t fill in your uneasiness by reading the bulletin, because there isn’t one. You can’t wait for the next part of the program to begin, because there is no program. Nothing at all happens unless God speaks, and you can’t break the tension by sharing your own pious or clever thoughts. It won’t work, because the leaders are mature enough to tell if it was God who spoke through you, or man.
Month: October 2005
Trying to get the world on your side
The chief danger of the Church today is that it is trying to get on the same side as the world, instead of turning the world upside down.
Brightening the death camp where you are
The call for Christians to become involved in every facet of society reminds me of Kurt Gerstein, a conservative German nationalist who tried to serve the Lord – as a concentration camp staff member. Continue reading “Brightening the death camp where you are”
Distant relationship with Jesus
I can’t understand people who seem to say that, because they talked to Jesus once when an evangelist asked them to, they now have a relationship with Jesus, with whom they hardly ever talk now.
We would have eaten you by now.
A young French anthopologist working in the South Pacific told a tribal chieftain reading the Bible, “Back in Europe nobody believes that old book of stories anymore.”
The old chieftain indulgently looked up from his Bible and told the young man, “Maybe so. But if it were not for that book of stories, we would have eaten you by now.”