I have never noticed or perceived that people were not interested in God anymore. People are incredibly hungry for God. It isn’t that people don’t want to experience God. It is that The Establishment Church of the 1950s is failing to be a place where that happens.
Last week, I posted a version of an article that I wrote for the Hamline Church newsletter in December. The topic was being a Godbearer in Advent, on pausing to make room to be an incarnation of God in our daily lives. This idea is inspired by The Godbearing Life, by youth ministry extraordinaire Kenda Creasy Dean.
Now, though, as I think more about it, and as we approach the third week of Advent, there’s more to be said.
Being a Godbearer is making space for God to enter into the world through us. Now more so than ever, I think, with the rage and outcry over the grand jury decisions in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases, we are called to make space for a new thing to happen in us.
Because I work with young people, I have the privilege of never taking anything for granted—even church. I work with people at that stage of life when they are just figuring out who they are and who they want to become, and nothing is sacrosanct when you’re trying to figure out the world.
What’s your theological anthropology? Who/what are we as human beings, things with bodies? Good, bad, some mixture of both?
I am partial to the explanation of what God is as given by 1 John. It is simple and it is powerful: God is love. This means that those who love are those who participate in God, those who are conduits for God’s activity, and those who, as John writes, Read more…