Amanda Hunsberger

“Leadership over God's people, which functions as God's household, does not require business savvy but moral probity and relationship skill. An elder, or overseer, must be hospitable and gentle, traits most would traditionally consider as feminine qualities. He must not cede parenting responsibility to his wife but rather must be directly involved in the rearing of his children, "keeping his children submissive" (v. 4). Interesting, it is his domestic abilities, in addition to his moral qualities, which are his qualifying grounds for ministry.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live "above" our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, "We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve's calling to care for a specific place, and God's instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities[...]" We cannot hurry the church's work of faithful presence, which is rooted in a particular place and committed to blessing a particular group of people. If Jesus has loved the world, the church must love its city.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“They depend on daily efforts and ordinary gestures, neither is once and done. Each requires a kind of liturgy, or routine, as an anchoring weight against the hosts of disordered desires that greet us in the morning before we've put a foot to the floor: selfish ambition, acedia, megalomania, greed. The liturgies of housework and practices like daily prayer ground us in a proper estimation of ourselves -- we are creatures, not the Creator. Our quotidian routines return us to our bodies of dusk, forging humility on the anvil of repetitive motion. We can't abandon the housekeeping, either the laundry or the liturgy[...]”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“Every day struck with tsunami force, and only by running full speed did I think I could outwit the daily violence[...] But to run is eventually to run out of breath. Soon I realized that life was not ever going to slow for me -- that I would have to slow for it. Slowing, in fact, would be my only hope of living life, not simply surviving it. And so, in one of the most improbably seasons of my life, I started practicing sabbath, nudged toward the discipline of rest by Gordon Macdonald's book Ordering Your Private World. "If my private world is in order," writes MacDonald, "it will be because I have chosen to press Sabbath peace into the rush and routine of my daily life in order to find the rest God prescribed for himself and all of humanity." As the mother of three young children, I gave up, for one day of the week, the rush to get ahead. The alternative felt like death.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home