It feels like American society is at a crisis point. Whether it’s social polarization or concerns over discrimination, a root problem identified by voices across the political spectrum is our difficulty with “the other.”

It feels like American society is at a crisis point. Whether it’s social polarization or concerns over discrimination, a root problem identified by voices across the political spectrum is our difficulty with “the other.”
Distrust and/or disuse make 2019 a difficult time for any institution. The church is up against both. As one of the oldest and most entrenched institutions in a world suspicious of its work, it’s important to ask whether we ought to shed some of our institutional identity.
I don’t know what it is like to be you, but when I think of “trust” in my life, I first want to make some clarifications: Because I am human and live in a real and broken world, I have trusted people and regretted it. Yet, I have also withheld trust from those who didn’t deserve my withholding.
Psalm 31 gives us the opportunity to explore and express our lives of faith.
The anxiety ran unchecked in my mind and caused me to doubt everything: relationships, my abilities and knowledge, God’s existence, whether I had faith, whether someone who doubts God and cannot find his own faith during his fifth year of seminary ought to be a pastor.