Tag: Christianity

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About Small Churches

“I propose that the following is true about the New Small Church

We are not sick

We are not failing

We are not stuck

We are not incompetent

We are not limited in our vision

We do not need to be fixed

We are not less than…

We are God’s idea.

We are small. Because we are small we have blessings to offer the body of Christ, our communities, our cities, our nations and our world that no one else can offer in quite the way we can.”

Vaters, Karl (2013-01-02). The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us (Kindle Locations 216-224). NewSmallChurch.com. Kindle Edition.

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Comparative Religion?

“Let us never measure our religion by that of others, and think we are doing enough if we have gone beyond our neighbours.” Ryle, J. C. Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties and Roots. London: William Hunt and Company, 1889.

 

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Libertarian Dogma: How Liberalism Became Intolerant

“From the dawn of the modern age, religious thinkers have warned that, strictly speaking, secular politics is impossible — that without the transcendent foundation of Judeo-Christian monotheism to limit the political sphere, ostensibly secular citizens would begin to invest political ideas and ideologies with transcendent, theological meaning.
Put somewhat differently: Human beings will be religious one way or another. Either they will be religious about religious things, or they will be religious about political things.
With traditional faith in rapid retreat over the past decade, liberals have begun to grow increasingly religious about their own liberalism, which they are treating as a comprehensive view of reality and the human good.
But liberalism’s leading theoreticians (Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Madison, Tocqueville, Mill) never intended it to serve as a comprehensive view of reality and the human good. On the contrary, liberalism was supposed to act as a narrowly political strategy for living peacefully in a world of inexorably clashing comprehensive views of reality and the human good.”

Clear thinking from Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a consulting editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.

The whole article here.