Marginal Christianity

5 Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory. 3 But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, 4 endurance produces character, and character produces hope. 5 This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.   You only really know a person, heir character, when you know what they’ve suffered.   So goes a popular aphorism.   And I think it’s true.   More importantly the apostle Paul seems to think it’s true as well.   In Romans 5:3-5 he explains why. As we saw in the last post in this series Christians can “boast” in their sufferings for Christ’s sake because these kinds of distress assure us we are standing w...

  Written by Stephen Taylor Monday, 17 November 2014 00:00 Events in Israel-Palestine have recently been overshadowed by the horrors in Syria and Iraq, but the tragedy of the Holy Land continues unabated. Even today (at the writing, Oct. 28, 2014) The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a brief article on the pledge of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to continue building in East Jerusalem (p. A5). “[T]hese places will stay in Israeli sovereignty under any agreement,” he is quoted as saying. Sadly, a majority of American evangelicals continues to regard Netanyahu’s stance as fully justified. With some notable exceptions, evangelical leaders and pundits are reluctant to focus on the suffering of Palestinian Arabs, many of them Christians, in this long ordeal. For some this reluctance is based on a complex set of considerations, but for nearly all – including the minority just mentioned – the prophetic promises to Israel enumerated in the Old Testament play a major rol...

The Insatiable God - monbiot.com   Posted: 18 Nov 2014 11:59 AM PST The blind pursuit of economic growth stokes a cycle of financial crisis, and wrecks our world. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19 th November 2014 Another crash is coming. We all know it, now even David Cameron acknowledges it(1). The only questions are what the immediate catalyst will be, and when it begins. You can take your pick. The Financial Times reports today that China now resembles the US in 2007(2). Domestic bank loans have risen 40% since 2008, while “the ability to repay that debt has deteriorated dramatically”. Property prices are falling and the companies that run China’s shadow banking system provide “virtually no disclosure” of their liabilities. Just two days ago, the G20 leaders announced that growth in China “is robust and is becoming more sustainable”(3). You can judge the value of their assurances for yourself. Housing bubbles in several countries, including B...

http://theyoungcurmudgeonpriest.blogspot.ca/2014/11/christian-identity-21st-century-crisis.html?m=1   The Church likes to fight - a lot.  Since the earliest days of Christianity the followers of Jesus Christ have been at odds with one another over one thing or another.  A simple reading of the Book of Acts is evidence to the ongoing struggle of early Christians to agree on much as they delivered the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world.  While some often long for the "old days" where everyone got along, that was never reality.  Wars, reformations, heresy trials...it goes on and on.  The Church has always been in conflict and that is not a terrible thing.  Nothing stays the same - the Church is like any living organism, it grows and becomes something new all the time and the Church grows through the guidance of the Holy Spirit and it is in discerning the call of the Holy Spirit that we argue and it is in discerning the call of the Holy Spirit that...

I like nice... nice is...well... nice. To Quote Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H , "It's nice to be nice to the nice." But nice is really boring. Jesus wasn't boring. The crowds didn't follow him all over Judea and Galilee hanging on every word he spoke because we was just nice. Nice hardly attracts crowds. Nice doesn't radically transform lives. Nice doesn't get one strung up on a cross. The day after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus and his disciples are out and about. Jesus is hungry and seeing a fig tree he discovers that it has no fruit, which is not a surprise since Mark tells us it was "not the season for figs" (Mark 11:12-15). That doesn't matter to Jesus. He curses the fig tree. It will wither and die. As William Willimon notes, "No fig tree is planted for shade. 'You will know them by their fruits' (Matt. 7:16). Somewhere along the line the tree stopped being productive and Jesus, unmoved by naturalistic e...

November 18, 2014 | By: Scott Bessenecker 0 Comments   0 Sidenotes Like most Protestant mission leaders I work in an office environment, complete with cubicle farm in which managers generally get fixed-walled offices and others work in movable, partial walls. It is a relatively efficient arrangement and mirrors the corporate headquarters of most for-profit organizations. In fact there is much in the Protestant ministry world which is a carbon copy of the capitalist corporation. For some the adoption of a commercial, corporate organizational form is simply contextualizing to our capitalist culture. But I wonder if the Protestant church and mission world has crossed a line from contextualization to syncretism. +   The Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, and Vanderbilts were early architects of American Protestant institutions, and they designed and ran these ministries under the paradigm of a commercial corporation. It was the organizational structure...

5 Therefore, since we have been made righteous through his faithfulness, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory. 3 But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, 4 endurance produces character, and character produces hope. 5 This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.   “We even take pride (“boast,” same Greek word as in v.2) in our problems” (better, “sufferings,” the difficulties we encounter for Christ’s sake).   “Boast is our distress for being faithful followers of Jesus” (see also James 1:2)?   Are we to be spiritual masochists?   Martyrdom seekers?   Here we get to a frequently misunderstood one of the deep roots of Christian existence. To make matters worse, in...