Human beings have never before lived lives so remote from nature, or been more insensible to the enigma it embodies. For late modern peoples, God has become ever more a myth, but so in a sense has the world; and there probably is no way of living in real communion with one but not the other.

Once the congregation concedes to helping people find fullness through busyness, it sets itself up to lose them.

What puts the local congregation in a crisis, I believe, is not necessarily that congregations are losing pace to dynamic stabilization (which is often how consultants and denominational officials frame it). Rather, the deeper issue is not only that people lack the time and energy for community, practice, and substantive moral traditions but that t

When church becomes a club, parables become pedestrian.