Sublime

Paul is evangelized by the act of ministry, by a minister sharing in his broken person. Paul must give himself over to the new narrative shape of Christ; he must have faith that this new narrative is the constitution of reality—that indeed from death comes life.

The question for those of us in the West, and particularly in America, is this—Why have we chosen to construct such fragile church systems? Why do we build ministries that rely upon a single fallible leader, one dynamic speaker, or that require massive and unsustainable amounts of money? Our devotion to fragile systems means as the pace of cultural

Young pastors, particularly, hate when people assume that they don’t drink, swear, or watch HBO (one of the reasons hotel restaurants are filled with cigar smoking and Scotch drinking at pastors’ conferences). Now in a secular age, with its attention to authenticity, this leftover conception of politeness and manners seems restricting at best and a

The sermon now needed to enter the personality of the listener. And Henry realized that the only key that fit the lock of individual personality was personality itself.

I don’t believe we modern Christians should always be comfortable with thinking of our God as an absolute monarch. It goes against important values I insist we should still cherish, even if those values have been given to us more by modern liberalism than by traditional religion, values such as equality, freedom, and democracy.

What makes the pastoral (or better, the ministerial) remain significant, even up against these transitions, is its ability to host an encounter with personhood. It appears, both in lived experience and the tradition, that divine action comes in and through personhood.