"God has slowly but surely revealed to me that my endless striving for love and admiration has been in vain, and that if I continued after it, it would also be an ever-smoldering oven, constantly needing to be fueled and fed. It was an idol."
Community and Relationships
A crucial gift that God has given us is Christian community. And by community, I don’t just mean Christians who hang out together but friends who lovingly speak God’s truth in grace to keep us on the right path. This is the kind of community the Bible encourages us toward.
In 1998, Albert Hsu received a call that his father had committed suicide. Here, Albert reflects on grief, the current statistics around suicide, where he finds hope, and how we can help those who might be struggling with suicidal thoughts.
Our kingdom mission will advance in greater measure as power gets balanced between the genders. We must do better.
What keeps us from building solid, thriving ministry partnerships between women and men?
As Charismatic Christianity affirms all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, believers can hear from God in multiple ways. God can speak through dreams, visions, prophetic words, or listening prayer. We see many examples of this in Scripture.
Although non-denom churches can be difficult to explain and define, I find them easy to justify. Non-denominational churches exist because God’s people are diverse and his passions include the entire earth. Some of us just don’t fit into a denominational box.
Anglicans have learned to see the churning conflict of each generation as an opportunity for worship, witness, and welcome. Sometimes articulated as via media or “the middle way,” Anglicans blur the lines between Protestant and Catholic, Reformed and Anabaptist, liberal and evangelical. This is our church’s greatest strength as well as its most profound weakness.
In terms of denominational origin stories, it’s hard to get more dramatic than Lutheranism.