Viral Faith

  Picture of Immigrating people sent from Texas and left on the streets of Chicago  I will show how holy my great name is—the name on which you brought shame among the nations. And when I reveal my holiness through you before their very eyes, says the Sovereign LORD, then the nations will know that I am the LORD (Ezekiel 36:23 NLT) "The truth of the gospel is turned into a lie when it ceases to look like Christ himself.  The true image of the Son is that of a person who gave up his own life out of love for the weak and hopeless."--Nijay K. Gupta and Scot McKnight in Galatians For those who are followers of Jesus, we are members of a universal family called the Church (notice the capitalization).  Local communities of Christians are referred to as churches (lowercase c), which collectively make up the Church (capitalized). Followers of Jesus are invited into the Church upon placing their trust in Jesus.  Local churches typically have a process of becoming a memb...

Jesus is repetitive, and his Judean hearers do not get the message because of the power of the dominant myth to exclude other possible truths.  -- Wes Howard-Brook in Becoming Children of God Today, I read an article where an author was making an attempt to define conservative and progressive Christians.  In his eagerness to define the two groups, he used theological terms to try and describe political realities. The purpose of the article was to analyze how different Christian identities impact political and faith practices.  I would disagree with the author in understanding that both self-identified conservative and self-progressive Christians can agree on the Inerrancy of Scripture and the centrality and exclusivity of Jesus in salvation (those are the two criteria he used).  I share this only to emphasize the politicization of Christian identity formation.  In fact, there is often such a fierce affinity towards political realities, that it is often fused in...