I am so grateful for John and Susan Yates: they and their church launched Restoration 9 years ago. They believed in God’s power to birth a new community in Arlington, they believed in how God might use me to lead it, and they believed in us- that we would creatively and strategically build something that […]
“The very purpose [of the church] was to be a light in the darkness– to be a presence in all the absences of the world.“ Greg Thompson, from his talk at Q When we started preaching through the book of Jeremiah this fall, I knew at some point we would have to talk about lament. […]
You are here because you have questions. Perhaps someone invited you to consider something new. Perhaps you have wanted to settle what you think and feel about ‘God’. Perhaps something has happened in your life that surprised you. Perhaps a situation has emerged for which you aren’t prepared. All of us have something that keeps […]
We are coming to the conclusion of our summer sermon series on the Fruit of the Spirit. These are 9 characteristics that St. Paul listed out in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Outside of a relationship with God, they are character traits that we admire in people […]
On Sunday, we talked about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. The timing of the story unearths some of our deep tension between the goodness of God and the reality of suffering. What do we do when it seems like God is absent or not paying attention or not fixing what is broken? What do […]
Oh, how we giggled, Kristen and I, especially late at night as we reflected on our day’s adventures throughout the Asia Minor trip. I can’t function on so little sleep without getting pretty giddy at times. I could barely contain my laughter at how obviously out of my element I was during one particularly challenging […]
I like to think I can tell lies from truth, but it is surprisingly difficult at times. The hardest lies to decipher are often the one that swarm around inside of our heads, trapping us in dark places and keeping us away from the light of truth. On April 24 I will start leading New […]
Erin Bair and I like to dialogue about cool stuff we are reading, and she sent me this quote by Alexander Schmemann: “If secularism in theological terms is a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is the negation of man as a worshiping being, as homo adorans: the one for whom worship is […]
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend “pastors’ school” at Duke Divinity School. The theme of the gathering was the arts in the life of the church. It was a great conference, with wonderful lectures by Jeremie Begbie, a reading by Marilynne Robinson (author of one of my all-time favorite books, Gilead), […]
I am reminded again how potent the book of Proverbs is. I am using the format of the One Year Bible to read through the Scriptures. Every day I (try to) read a couple chapters of Old Testament, a chapter of New Testament, about ten verses of a Psalm, and sometimes only two verses of […]