Status Updates From The Reason for Church: Why ...

Any relationship focused on preventing harm or staying safe more than cultivating vulnerability and intimacy only exacerbates hurt feelings and neglect real needs

Conscience is an important guardrail, but it’s a terrible North Star. Our intuitions are not utterly untrustworthy, but they aren’t ultimately trustworthy either.

Just as no surgeon can remove a tumor using only anesthesia, no one can love others without risk of hurt

Good therapists point inward to explore emotional realities to gently bring them out for deeper healing. Good pastors, absolutely facilitate and support healing, but they do so by pointing upward to the greater spiritual reality of Christ. Both empower is to face a broken world with greater resilience, but they do so by deepening our understanding of overlapping distinct realities

“Setting boundaries” is used more often to avoid conflict than resolved it

Spiritual intuitionism, lack of language to articulate signs, symbols, and boundaries that traditional religions used to cultivate community and connect through shared ritual, meaning, and purpose

So much of what we now refer to as deconstruction is the downstream, next-gen fruit of the Jesus movements, institutionally thin revival, and the unintended consequence of teaching Christians to secure their faith and individual experience rather than the institutional church

As churches stray from their God ordain purpose of glorifying God, making disciples, and loving our neighbors into meeting needs they aren’t equipped for, pastors, and congregate alike. We’ll find themselves an ambitious feedback loop of disappointment and distrust.

We now accept as common sense the romantic notion that intuitionism (“I feel, therefore it’s true”) is a pure and more reliable compass in life

Reconciliation is simply compromise in the acceptance that one is not always right, and that one’s feeling should not always preview or be seen as objective truth. Compromise doesn’t invalidate your word as an individual; and exchange for tolerating the eccentricity and folds of others, you get to be in a real community that will sustain and support you.-Katherine Alejandra Cross

Christianity breaks down walls of hostility, the sacred self builds in in the name of safety

Our next church Defeater, the sacred self, is the belief that we, individually, are our only reliable source for truth, and, especially, identity… We’ve turned our intuition into a self-contained and self protecting spirituality

No matter how much trust has been earned, caregiving, safety demonstrated, or times spent doing all of the above, there’s an invisible boundary that, if transgressed, has become become a relational point of no return. It varies only slightly…or shortly after the point where you suggest that how they feel is valid and understandable yet may not fully or accurately represent reality

If we wouldn’t be OK with our kids, leaving our family for when they think we better help them grow, then we shouldn’t leave our church for one with a better youth ministry.

“ Christ builds the church. Whoever is mindful to build the church is surely well on the way to destroying it, for he will build a temple to idols without wishing or knowing it.” -Dietrich Bon Hoffer.

In Willow Creek Association comprehensive multi year qualitative study they found that increasing levels of participation in ministry programs and activities does not predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ, whether they love God more, or they love people more

Only within God’s redemptive institution, the church, sinners, and Turners be brought in, built, and sent out to spiritually, socially, and culturally transform a world made in hospitable by radical individualism

At their core, institutions are a culturally, adaptive and common grace, social technology – a means for groups of people to cultivate and preserve values, organize themselves for specific ends, and Stuart power the individuals can’t or shouldn’t on their own

Individualism aspires to achieve rather than receive our identity

True freedom is not about autonomy, but about learning how to live humbly and non-anxiously within the beauty of our design

While we are blazing, our own futures, without any obligations to others or communities, we are not truly free, but rather in bondage to ourselves