Sarah’s Reviews > The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism > Status Update

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