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Evangelicals generally insist that "the meaning and purpose of life is to have a personal relationship with Jesus." That's how a Methodist pastor I was listening to a few months ago put it. Philip Yancey says it another way in his Reaching for the Invisible God (Zondervan, 2000): "getting to know God" is a lot like getting to know a person. You spend time together, whether happy or sad. You laugh together. You weep together. You fight and argue, then…

"How much should we pay the pastor?" The annual dance around this question at the local church is often difficult and confrontational. Everybody involved hopes to spend as little time on the matter as possible. A financial figure is arrived at by some unrepeatable method, which allows for no discussion of the principles used to arrive at the number. Until both congregations and denominations discuss clergy remuneration long enough to get beyond merely setting a figure, the church will be…

During the counter-culture years in the late 1960s an angry man bluntly accused me of turning my back on the church. That's how he interpreted my beard and long hair. I explained how all this hair might help me relate better to young people struggling with their faith. He became as gracious as he had been blunt. "Keep struggling," he shouted enthusiastically. He was a very conservative man with a sense of spirituality in context. Conflicts about tradition usually take…

from Immanuel xxiii Mud-splotched, chiggered, thorn-matted hair and beard, naked, a scurried, spidery- crawl on all fours, snarls, bellows, less human the more they heard: the man squatted atop a summit of scree and howled. Jesus disembarked the boat; his disciples stayed. Vine-webbed cave tombs of the Gadarenes loomed as home. Jesus held out his hand. The man wailed, flung stones, sun-caked feces. Don't torture me, Son of the Most High. Eyes rolled back white, his mouth foamed. Rusted manacles…

Americans are not comfortable with their nation being associated with the term "empire." Despite its substantial numbers of troops and governing power in Afghanistan and Iraq today, the only persons calling the current American military and political exploits imperialistic are misty-eyed British commentators like Niall Ferguson, who urge Americans to accept their destiny to rule the world. In domestic discourse, the issue of empire has been ignored despite the fact that some 380,000 American troops are deployed today around the…

It is only human nature to grip too tightly and compress the certainties into too-limited, too-simple formulations. Part of us wants truth to come in portable sizes. In trying to explain who Jesus is, for example, Christians can manage to reduce him to the good moral teacher in sandals, the wise founder of a social justice movement, a model CEO, their personal life consultant, the knight who defends their version of the truth, or even--if the worst contemporary worship songs…