The Congregation in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #3): Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life

There is something healthy and reviving to our spirituality about slowing down with silence, rest, and meditation. These practices open us to the mystery of time. They take us deeper into time, making us available to the movements of divine action breaking into time, to the very ways time is enveloped by eternity.

Inside dynamic stabilization, numbers become the clearest measure of such growth that avoids decline and the risk of failure.

Though few of us would directly advocate this excarnate position, we have nevertheless exchanged transformation for stabilization and sustainability.

Revelation comes in hypostatic union, and Jesus promises to be present in the resonant connection of receiving (ministering to) persons. Resonance is dependent on efficacy, and when we approach children in this spirit of efficacy, when we take responsibility for them, we encounter the living Christ.

In late modernity we’re not willing or able to name (beyond for our individual selves) the virtues, the values, or the character traits that make for a good life. We may have some ideas, but describing the substance seems to risk violating the ethic of authenticity. Our moral stance—our sense of what is good and what creates a good life—is authenti

Alienation is overcome when we find ourselves taken up and bound deeply in a relationship with the world. When bound deeply in the welcoming mystery of relationship, we feel full. We feel like life is good. We sense that we are relating deeply to the world, and the world to us. Resonance reverses alienation’s toxin. When we sense that there is some

Connecting change to prophesies of old would be as important as any new innovations. Divine meaning and connection to history would need to be firmly tied to any change.

We live in a secular age because time itself has been emptied of the sacred. This makes the church, and its keeping of and attending to the fullness of gathered time, unnecessary. And this unnecessariness unmoors the church, leading us to wonder what the church is for at all.

But to be truly human is not simply to participate in these components but to give them symbolic meaning. We receive our very identities (both collectively and individually) through the narrative meaning of our stories, journeys, and creations.