Five Theses on Church Renewal

Unless we know we’re in a battle, we’ll never have the urgency necessary for faithfulness.

Unless we know God’s big picture/story of where he taking this world and what he created it for, we’ll never live or bear witness to the gospel properly.

Unless our community is relationally thick enough to share the disciplines and rigors of our battle, we cannot help but give in, give out, or give up in our struggle.

Unless we re-educate ourselves to read good novels and poetry and free our imaginations to play with biblical patterns and images, we will keep on reading the Bible in the flat, linear, idealist ways that have brought us to our current impasse.

Unless we rediscover the Spirit in more than the now traditional Pentecostal and charismatic ways but as the Nicene Creed puts it, “the Lord, the giver of life,” who sends us into the life he gives to bear witness to its triune Creator and Redeemer, we will never know who we truly are and what we are to be about in the world.