Sublime

Our deeds must be consistent with our creeds, and our beliefs must be backed up with Christlike behavior.

Throughout volumes 1 and 2 I’ve claimed that Jesus Christ becomes present when we give and receive ministry person to person. Bonhoeffer can claim that Jesus Christ exists as church-community because the church-community is in the form of personhood, and Jesus Christ is present in and through personhood (this is deeply incarnational).

I want to supplement Willard’s emphasis on the individual practice of the spiritual disciplines with what might be a counterintuitive thesis in our “millennial” moment: that the most potent, charged, transformative site of the Spirit’s work is found in the most unlikely of places—the church!

bottle. He works with people, allowing their desires to draw him into the core conversations of life.

The body of Christ is that unique community of practice whose members own up to the fact that we don’t always love what we say we do—that the “devices and desires” of our hearts outstrip our best intentions. The practices of Christian worship are a tangible, practiced, re-formative way to address this tension and gap.

With its dedicated volunteer culture, focus on inspiring traditional davening, high-level Torah study, and egalitarian, universal outlook, Kehilat Hadar attempts to live out a world of Empowered Judaism.

When a congregation’s identity is in its resources, it is on an accelerating pace that alienates it from the world, making it excarnate in thought and practice.

A congregation becomes depressed when its identity continues to rest on its resources instead of its relationships.