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On Curiosity and War Stories

I have found great freedom in this gentle posture. It allows the space to get things wrong, continually learn, and recognize we always read scripture informed by our needs and cultural context. This means it is okay to grasp only part of what scripture might be saying. It is okay to get it wrong here and there. That’s why we work these things out in community.
October 18, 2021
ChurchFeatured

What Holds Us Together: A Conversation with Trisha Taylor and Jim Herrington

What holds us together? If agreement is what holds us together, then every so often when something emerges that we disagree on, we will have to go through this again and again, and again, and again. If what holds us together is our agreement, then just buckle up for serial conflict because we will have to slug it out often, because there's always a new question. There's always a new issue emerging. Think about your history, about how deep the…
October 11, 2021
ChurchFeatured

Standing on their Shoulders: An interview with Marchiene Rienstra

As the decades go by, pioneers are forgotten. It’s important to acknowledge we stand on the shoulders of those who came before. And, it’s very encouraging, if you’re one of those pioneers, to see the progress. We’re not doing this work for ourselves, but for everyone coming after us. I remember a conversation I had with another church leader about moving ahead, even when there isn’t consensus. He said to me, “We can’t always wait until we have a convoy.”…
October 4, 2021
ChurchFeaturedOld Testament

Whitewashed Images

In the Reformed tradition, worship is an encounter with the living God, who, through the power of the Holy Spirit, speaks to congregants through the preaching of the word and communes with them in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Without the location of God in a place or object, without encountering God in word and sacrament, how can a believer’s restless longing for communion with God ever be satisfied?
September 20, 2021
Featured

Poetry’s Mad Instead

We have a Creator who calls on the creation to create. We have a God who calls us to praise God’s marvelous deeds and summons us to sorrow over the sins of this world. Poets draw us into praise and sorrow through the songs they sing. They reconnect us with God’s world by wrenching this world awry. Their “mad instead” nourishes the faith of the faithful by making the familiar fresh.
Abram Van Engen
September 13, 2021
ChurchFeaturedWorship

The Baptism of the Spirit

The church has been entrenched for centuries in disputes about baptism, and our confidence in our own baptisms can weaken in the trenches. In this essay I want to suggest one way out of the baptismal trenches. I will point to the trail of the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts.
Daniel Meeter
September 6, 2021
FeaturedMemoir

Cosmic Companionship

If we practice slowing down and paying attention—if we truly take the Sabbath to heart—we will find that wild geese and herons and burning bushes are everywhere. The world is always offering itself to our imagination!
August 30, 2021
EducationFeatured

CRT and the Christian School

My theory is that many Christian school educators have used different lenses to arrive at similar conclusions as CRT. As Reformed Christians who hold the Bible as our ultimate source of knowledge and truth, we need to be careful not to dismiss common grace working in secular arenas and not to discard Biblical ideas about justice and ethics because they arise from a secular ideology. 
August 23, 2021