I said “initial” because truth is I’ve got plenty more and just usually lack the time to write them. I think a lot fast than I write. 🙂

There are mountain climbers, surveyors and engineers. The village can’t follow mountain climbers. If you want to move a village you’ve got to build a highway and the truth is that the story of Christianity is a lot of highway building. Our confessions where highways built not just by theologians, but by pastors, and elders and leaders and communities. The scope of the difference between some mountain climbers doing some initial surveying and moving a village is like the scope we’re looking at with some of these things. If you want to move a village you have lots of questions. “Why do we need to move. I like it here. My parents were born here. This is my home.” and not everyone will take that journey and probably most people don’t have to but some will.

If anyone is feeling scared they should be happy to know that they are sane. There is plenty to be scared about, but that is also life. What is true is that all of what we need we have and that what we need to do is to keep working on all of the things found in scripture that are beyond dispute but that we find very difficult in issues far beyond and far more important than Genesis and science or whatever scary thing is troubling you. We need to learn to trust God. We need to believe in his word. We need to learn to listen to each other. We need to learn to extend trust to others even with things that are precious to us and to give people some space to make mistakes or try new things. We need to reign in our temptations to control others. We need to figure out how institutions work, how they need to work for the wellbeing of the broader community. All of these things we need to do and if we can do some of this then we will actually, probably be able to make some progress.