More often than I would care to admit, I have allowed my personal fantasies about the perfect community to distract me from the beautiful, real-life community that is right in front of me. I’ve found that making community an abstract ideal is the enemy of real, flesh-and-blood fellowship. The idealized community seems so much bigger, …
And now it’s moving, and everybody plays a part. It’s a living breathing being, with a brain and a heart. It’s a living breathing being, you can tell it by its art. It’s a living, breathing being just like corporations aren’t. From Occupy Your Life, by Jon Watts It’s hard to think of any organ …
Dear friends, This past month has been very full! I’ve visited friends in Philadelphia, and family and friends in Kansas, on top of my usual work routine. I have also felt called into an increasingly intense schedule of visitation with individuals and families here in the DC area. I have often been tired lately, but …
Read more “Unleashing Our Spiritual Gifts – Micah’s Ministry Newsletter #54”
I belong to a faith tradition that highly values action. Drawing on the broad witness of Scripture, Quakers are convinced that the sign of true faith is that it is lived out in daily life. Reciting a creed, affirming a statement of faith, or even reading the Bible, is no guarantee of faithfulness. We can …
Last week, I posted an essay entitled, Should We Give Up God For Lent? The piece was a critique of what I saw as some serious problems with the message of scholar, speaker and community-founder Peter Rollins. I took issue particularly with his campaign, Atheism for Lent, which provocatively asks Christians to give up God …
This past week, I traveled in the ministry among Friends in the Mid-Atlantic. Along with my companions from Michigan, Baltimore and Philadelphia, we held a revival meeting for Friends in the Philadelphia area, as well as attending a gathering of Christian Friends on Long Island. This was one of the more epic road trips I …
Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in …