Marginal Christianity

The Prison Letters of Paul:                                                                                                                                Equipping God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (SCRM) From the fall of Adam and Eve on God determined to win his wayward human creatures and creation careening toward chaos on their account bac...

The Church Can Help But is Not Essential to My Growth No!           No! has to said loud and clear to this diminishment and denial of the church’s necessity for Christian growth. The church is vital and essential for Christian growth. The early church leader Tertullian knew this and went so far as to call the church “our mother.” She is the womb in which Christians grow to maturity. That’s the short answer to this “If You Think . . .” statement. However, a good deal more needs to be said filling out this response. What is the Church ? It’s an understatement to say we need a fresh image that captures what church is about that has been lost or obscured and rendered in an idiom that recaptures the sharp edge of its calling. In America, I contend, that image is the church as God's “Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement” (SCRM). After Genesis 3 the nature and shape of God's people has been a community sent by God to subvert the a...

"The Church is In Post-Christian Exile – But Should We Really Respond Like It's a War?” is the title of Karina Kreminski's article on Missio Alliance today. She's responding to another piece on the church entering Phase Two of our exile and how we should respond. And her responses are wise and to the point. It's not her responses, though, that I want to say a few words about. It's the imagery in her title, “But Should We Really Respond Like It's a War?” I want to say a vigorous and unrepentant “Yes” to that image! First, though, a clarification or two. I do NOT have in mind actual military conflict or the use of weapons in any fashion. I'm a pacifist and I believe the church should be too. Nor do I mean the strident, angry, mean-spirited culture war type of warfare. Both of these types of conflict are antithetical to participation in God's mission in the world. Yet . . . we are in a war! A war whose decisive and climactic battle has alread...