Sublime

In a secular age, when the good life is deferred to the dream-state of the future, the church loses any sense of scope. The congregation narrows and becomes a service organization of resources. It is no longer a community of practice and tradition that wears a wholly distinct orientation to time.

ministry. Like any gift, we have truly received it when we are moved to gratitude—not when we feel guilty or deserving. The church can only be the household of ministry by first receiving ministry. We can never start by giving ministry without first receiving ministry, because ministry is bound in the being of God’s self.

When we pay attention to practices, we are likely to notice the significance and beauty in small acts of grace and truth. We have a framework for talking about what is good and holy in our ordinary communities, and for seeing how we can strengthen places that might need it. While dealing with practical concerns, practices can also help move our dis

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.

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

We add adjectives to “faith” because in the end faith is not about divine action but about maintaining religious space.

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

the pastor’s job was not to take people into sacred time or uphold the sacredness of ordinary life but to help people flourish, and it appeared that the new secular disciplines of psychology and sociology were much more helpful in this vein.

But as we’ll see, both needed to take on particular visions of divine action next to their pastoral practice, embedding their own personhood in these visions to clearly lead their people into divine action.