“We tested a handful of churches to see how well they were listening on Twitter. The results were painful, with only one out of 11 churches bothering to reply. Your church doesn’t need to be on Twitter, but if you’re on there (and promoting it on your home page), you should at least be paying attention when people send you messages.” – CMS
Right now I’m teaching parables with my fourth grade class, and they are really bothered by the injustice of God’s love and mercy. It makes them crazy to contemplate that even though they try to be good, God loves someone bad just as much. Fairness is the highest value to kids that age, and to imagine that God isn’t fair—that’s just too much.
This fine little video on YouTube, “Reasons (why people don’t come to church)” is a must watch!
“We’ve become detached from nature,” Maathai told me recently during a trip to New York City. “And as you move away from nature, you become lost.”
Part of the community whose voice needs to be considered, is that of the Tradition – that is, what has been said over the years about any given passage of scripture. We, in the present time, are not the only ones who have struggled with these passages, and our own understanding needs to be informed by the larger community of the faithful in the past.
. . . the idea of a special, even divine, role for America can be fairly slippery. At its best, it has inspired Americans to hold themselves to a high moral standard, serving as exemplar to other nations. At its worst, it becomes a license for rationalizing away morality itself.
Say not, “We are unable to set our own hearts on heaven; this must be the work of God only.” Though God be the chief disposer of your hearts, yet, next under him, you have the greatest command of them yourselves. Though without Christ you can do nothing, yet under him you may do much, and must, or else it will be undone, and yourselves undone through your neglect.
… the gap between computer knowledge of parents and their kids, parents unwillingness to see their children’s bullying as anything other than a joke, teens and parents unwillingness to confront the behavior for fear of more bullying, and authorities – school and police – unwillingness to act leave the internet wide open for abuse.
Meanwhile a heated debate might be underway in England, with questions in Parliament about the possibility that grieving six-year-olds might be told that their beloved grandparents were burning in hell,…