In addition to the fact that I apparently have a soft spot for Christmas carols with the symphonic “O” in their title, I love “O Come” because it is achingly beautiful. The minor key quiets my frenzied brain even as it stirs up deeper longings in my soul—a hunger and thirst for righteousness, to see Jesus face-to-face.
This is how it often feels to work for an institution like the church in 2019. Trends so much larger than myself make my prayers and pastoral work feel meaningless. I’ve been feeling this way about my denomination, the RCA, recently. Each week in our church, we say some version of this refrain: When the person of Jesus Christ is at the center of our lives and our worship, there is space for loving one another in disagreement.
What lessons might we, as Christian stewards of the creation, take from this story of the ozone hole?
The first part of this article stated the dangerous (albeit tempting) tennets of Gnosticism and how they lead to the separation of the spiritual and the physical; and in this part of the article, I will continue to discuss how our physical states should demonstrate our inner spirituality.
Jonathan Merritt, in his new book, sets out to learn how to speak about his faith in new ways in order to articulate the central ideas so that non-Christians can understand.
Collin Hansen’s describes the popular resurgence of Calvinist doctrine in the first decade of the twentieth century in three words: young, restless, and Reformed.
