Dear Church Member, Your Shepherd Is Also a Sheep
Sean DeMars:Your pastor is a shepherd, but he’s still a sheep. You can serve him by making sure he’s able to attend conferences, workshops, and pastoral groups that will build him up. Shepherd him even as he seeks to do the same for you. I have two brothers in my congregation who are not elders, but whom I nonetheless call or email when I’m struggling. I may not share much other than, “Hey brother, tough day today. Pray for me,” but it’s comforting to know godly brothers are praying for my labors (James 5:16).
It’s Not All Going to Burn
Lore Ferguson Wilbert:Even as I write this, I’m aware that I’m using Notre Dame as an illustration myself. I’m just as powerless against a good illustration as the next person. All I know is how I lamented as I watched those flames steal, kill, and destroy a man-made structure that’s stood almost a millennium. There aren’t many things in our world today that have stood that long. I think even of the rocks on the coast of Maine, how the wind, weather, and waves have battered and broken them back over centuries. Nothing stands forever. Or does it?
Heresy Often Begins with Boredom
Brett McCracken:But sometimes heresy begins not in a place of head-scratching, frustrating paradox. It simply begins with boredom. It begins when the thrill of orthodoxy is simply not very thrilling to us anymore, when our familiarity with faith breeds contempt, discontentment, and a dangerous restlessness. And so we take it upon ourselves to dress up Christianity, modernize it, reframe and repackage it for a new age.
How to Avoid Accumulated Fatigue
Zack Eswine:Accumulated fatigue signals the gradual build-up of circumstantial stresses, mental challenges, and relational sorrows. It doesn’t ride right up to you and bandit you. It embezzles you instead. Like a slow-leaking tire, you don’t notice the gradual siphoning of air, the subtle lean of the car from its depleted strength.
“What I Learned After Being Hit by a Bus” Karen Swallow Prior:
