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Worship: Entertaining Goats
or Feeding Sheep?
On my way to work each morning I cycle past a
huge Baptist church in the style of a Greek temple. On its signboard
is posted this notice: “We are in the business of feeding
sheep, not entertaining goats.” Without fail, the thought
sets off my chuckle mechanism. Usually I am not a fan of slogans,
but this curt saying hits the core of the difficulty churches
are having with worship in our times.
[Read more]
A Quarter Century of Peacemaking
Thanks be to God, the Presbyterian Peacemaking
Program will celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary next year.
Presbyterians have engaged in peacemaking ever since there have
been Presbyterians. But in 1980, the United Presbyterian Church
in the U.S.A. adopted a document that would establish the groundwork
for what is now the Peacemaking Program, lodged in the Congregational
Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
[Read more]
Presbyterian Mission in a Post-Modern World
Let’s begin with a brief disclaimer. I don’t particularly
like the word “post-modern.” It is one of those
catch phrases that can mean anything from “trendy”
or “hip” to “post-Christian” or new cognitive
frameworks and patterns for processing information. For our
purposes, we simply need to understand that we live in a changing
world; one where information, technology, and population shifts
do not match the assumed patterns of the past generations.
[Read more]
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