I was with a friend who had gone through a major life trauma and he was talking about a conversation he’d just had with another friend. “He told me, ‘Don’t put any expectations on me,’” my […]
Tag: Community
The Journey — 9 things a canoe trip teaches us about following Jesus
When each of my boys turns 13, I take them on a week-long canoe trip on the Bowron Lakes — a chain of about a dozen lakes way up in the interior of British Columbia. […]
The Journey — 17 things a hiking trip teaches us about following Jesus
A while back, I joined a few other helpers to take about a dozen middle schoolers on a camping trip for two nights and days. And we survived! We spent a lot of one day […]
If the church isn’t a community, it’s nothing
The church exists to be a sign of the breaking in of the kingdom of God into a world of torn apart relationships. The church does not exist to sing songs; to listen to sermons; to […]
Declaration of Dependence
I am glad to be an American. There’s so much about my country that I’m grateful for. But there’s something that catches inside me when we celebrate Independence Day each July 4. While I’m glad […]
Faith is a continuing conversation
This past Sunday, I had the opportunity to listen to a friend of mine (also named Pete) preach. He started the sermon with a clip from a movie we’d seen together several years before and […]
Creating islands of community in a sea of loneliness
In the book The Martian (which the movie is based on), an astronaut is accidentally left on Mars during a storm when the rest of the crew believes he is dead. He survives all kinds of […]
Who speaks grace into your life?
I try to duck and dodge from it, but the reality of my sin is always before me. It’s ugly. It’s embarrassing. It’s persistent. But the grace of our Lord is just as real, just as […]
How social media messes up our experience of community
Control. That’s the problem with social media. I’m in control. You’re in control. Our social media worlds revolve around us like planets around a sun. It’s the web and I am the spider, sitting plumply […]
When God dumps out your toy box … it must be time to play!
You can always tell what toys my kids are into, because they’re all over the house. I do a lot of cleaning up of the toys behind my kids. But they just keep dumping them out again. […]
A simple spiritual health survey
What does spiritual health and maturity look like? How do I gauge where I’m at and where I need to grow? When I think of discipleship — a life of following Jesus — I see […]
Getting real — four pegs to hang your life on
Our lives are a complex mass of thoughts, emotions, relationships, and activities. And there is no time of the year that is free from experiencing personal traffic jams. With four kids in four different schools and all their […]
How is community formed in our new nomadic era?
The way community has been formed for much of the last 4,000 years has come unravelled in the last few decades. Where agrarian societies were primarily stable farming communities — your farm and your neighbors’ farms […]
Re-membering — the relationship between community, worship & covenant
One of our sanest writers is Wendell Berry. His contribution as a Christian essayist to the environmental movement has been unique and profound. His poetry, especially his Sabbaths collection, is evocative and wise. But it’s his […]
Church is about a community to serve, not a service to attend
Relationships are both the means and the end of this life. We were made for community, and yet it is the most difficult thing we ever do. The biblical account confirms this. After an amazing […]
It's not about Me (it's about Us)
In the original stage play of The Sound of Music there’s a song called “No Way To Stop It” that didn’t make it into the more famous movie. It’s sung by Max (the family friend […]
A trinitarian view of being human that corrects our either/or approaches
I was reading an excellent article, nodding all the way, until I got to the point where the author made a distinction between two types of people and then sided with one of them. From […]
In praise of tables
I’m sitting at a coffee table right now. It’s a rough-cut, slapped together affair that’s not all that flat and full of dings. But it’s over a century old and cost us nothing and it’s […]