Essays & Thoughts · Common Ground Seattle

Essays &
Thoughts

New Leadership 14 min read

The Problem
with the Church

The problem is not error. The problem is that we stopped growing. A major problem with the church is not sin induced by cultural influences, but its failure to continue growing in maturity — and if Christlikeness is acquired through an endless series of transformations, then there is nothing to go back to.

Stasis The same place Transformation Circumambulations of living faith
The eighteen-year-old may believe the same things at forty, but he believes them differently — more completely, and with less perforated innocence.
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If we acquire Christlikeness through an endless series of transformations, then there is nothing to go back to. Stasis itself is eventually destructive of the faith.

Greg Gorsuch · The Problem with the Church

In formation

02

Differentiated Unity

Acts 2 and the Trinity: why a community that cannot hold difference has not achieved unity, only uniformity.

Drafting

03

Beauty Will Save the World

Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and indirect communication — on why Jesus so rarely spoke plainly.

Notes

04

Belonging Before Believing

What the order of the three B’s actually costs a church, and what it costs the people who never make it past the first one.

Drafting

05

Cruciform Metamorality

A theory of what makes Christ’s teaching metamoral, and why the shape of ethics, and of the universe, is a cross.

Proposed