Christian community

The separate spheres of our lives, and the imagination it takes to forge deeper community

I love the church. It's harder to love specific congregations.

Divisions mark our society—and our churches. What could possibly bring us together?

The evangelical group teaches farming, provides hospitality to newly arrived refugees, and watches the local salmon.

Rod Dreher calls on Christians to form deeper, more distinct communities. This should sound familiar to liberals.

"It is by being in solidarity with sinners that Jesus brings about reconciliation. This is not a picture of Jesus that churches often emphasize."

The church is not an ark floating on the top of the waters. It lives and breathes within the waters.

Hardness of heart. Scripture uses this image to describe those who are impenetrably stubborn, those who are unwilling or unable to see God’s glory or to reorient their lives to God’s call and claims. But what causes hardness of heart? Is it always human sin, those things which we have done which ossify our hearts and rigidify our minds? Do tragic accidents sometimes harden us in ways that make it difficult, if not impossible, to remain open to transformation, to sustain a mental, emotional and moral agility?

I ran into Perry recently. How many years has it been, I wonder? I came to know Perry when he visited our church. He was a man with no passion of his own, a guy who walked from church to church and seemed to come to life only when he discovered some well-hidden heresy or doctrinal error. For Perry, Christianity was only a means to an end.

Those weathering Katrina’s aftermath see no end in sight. “It's going to go on for years,” says United Methodist bishop Hope Morgan Ward. "For years and years." “We’re not back to normal, and I don’t know what that would be like,” says Nelson Roth, pastor of Gulfhaven Mennonite Church in Gulfport, Mississippi.

A church in Oregon has a rule: no one in its membership will be in need.