The (Lieben)GOOD LIFE

  My reflections on the way our technological age is shaping us at Intersections . Enjoy!

  Practice "Where are you?" It’s an honor to be here, to be asked to encourage ministry leaders who serve here and in this region. I stubbornly and doggedly am convinced that pastors, shepherds, teachers, spiritual directors  in all their forms and degrees do the most important job in the world.  The greatest challenge of ministry is finishing—and finishing well. How do we become people that can endure till the end? Better yet, how can we become people who thrive?  I don’t pretend to have the answer to this question. But I would like to share with you a practice that I have found to be sustaining and life giving. Orienting Your Day with “Where are you?” For the past three years (with varying degrees of consistency), I have incorporated a practice into my morning routine—one that emerged both as a result of my study of Genesis 3, but also from becoming more aware of some of my own self-sabotaging patterns. Rather than starting my day journaling about all the things I...

  Made to Be Known, Known to Bring Peace.   We all come into the world looking for someone who is looking for us.   This is one of the most significant insights of neuroscience: our brains together with our bodies are made in such a way that they need others in order to function properly. In other words, at the very level of biology, physiology, and chemistry, we are designed to be interdependent; we are made to thrive by living in a community of vulnerability. We need to be seen by another, to be noticed by another, to be attended to by another, to be known, and to be cared for.   This is not a unique insight, of course. Genesis 1-2 tells us a similar story. It is not good for us to be alone. The world is an intricately ordered place of hyper-relationality. That is to say that all things function best when they are in right relationship with God’s ordering. Humans flourish when they are in right relationship to God, right relationships with others, have a prop...

Recently I was asked to speak at the national conference for the Association for Christians in Student Development (ACSD). The organizers asked me to give a theological account for the work of student development and to show how the themes of the conference connected to the good work of student life. Here is the first installment of the six talks I gave on June 10-13.  Session 1   The Good Work of Student Development: Participating in the Ongoing Work of Jesus Christ.   Thank you, Dr. Morgan for allowing me to be a part of this gathering. I wish you could all be on our campus this week, and I wish I had to the opportunity to meet you and hear your stories, and to learn more about the important work that you do on our campuses.   I must say that of late I have come to appreciate the important work you do at a deeper, more personal level. That is not to say that I didn’t appreciate your work before! As a former campus pastor, and as someone who became a Chris...

  American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling . They have gone whoring after other gods. What the do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries… The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns—how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money. Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputati...