Sublime

A congregation that carries children, as Meredith’s does, is a life-community, a community not hunting resources but encountering resonance. This congregation’s life is not in its innovation but in its encounter with the concrete others whom it ministers to and is ministered by.

If a congregation wants change, it will start not by being concerned with relevance and resources, but with the good life of resonance, seeking for the living Christ where Christ can be found, in the disclosure of personhood, where time is not made to accelerate but becomes full and sacred. Time becomes full and sacred through the continued disclos

Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with ‘sinners and publicans’, must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the ‘highways and hedges’ of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are member

Soon enough, the most central question for both mainline and evangelical pastors was, How can we reach more and more people? They did not ask how they could testify to God’s eternity breaking into time. They asked how they could keep from losing pace up against the threat of secular 2.

To be in his presence is not only to be challenged and comforted; it is to celebrate at table.

Henry’s new mold was cast from a belief that divine action came not through duty to doctrines and traditions but through positive feelings—Henry was the first to so successfully mix Calvinism with Romanticism.

Rather, the congregation that is a life-community sees its children as persons. It seeks to be a community that surrounds and carries them, not for some undefined future but in this now, in this broken and yet delightful now. Children gather time. By carrying them, we’re moved deeply into the now.

The Rule is another example of Augustine’s spiritual realism: it is an honest, unsentimental guide for the challenges of living in community, well acquainted with the heart’s crooked bent toward selfishness, snobbery, greed, and exclusion.