Leadingchurch.com

How do you answer the big questions of life? What are the big questions?

Well you go to the Internet of course. Aren’t all of the answers there?

• 6 Things Intersex Folks Need to Know About How We Perpetuate Anti-Black Racism
• Why Saying ‘It’s My Choice’ Doesn’t Necessarily Make Your Choice Feminist
• 3 Ways My Parents Unintentionally Taught Me That My Consent Didn’t Matter
• 3 Ways Men Who Loved Me Violated My Consent – And What This Says About Rape Culture
• 17 Lies We Need to Stop Teaching Boys About Sex
• 5 Things Your Activist Friend Wants You to Stop Doing (Because You’re Wearing Us Out)
• 4 Ways to NOT Respond to Celebrity Intimate Partner Violence
• 9 Strategies for Dealing with Body Dysphoria for Genderqueer and Trans Folks
• 6 Ways to Tell If You Need to Be Called Out
• 5 Things You Don’t Realize When You Defend Cultural Appropriation
• 8 Signs Your Yoga Practice Is Culturally Appropriated – And Why It Matters
• 7 Things We Need to Stop Saying to People Taking Anti-Depressants
• Here’s What Every Sexually Active Survivor Deserves in Their Sex Life
• The Terrible Invisibility of Being Bisexual and in Poverty
• Why Is It So Hard To Be a Good Man?

Haven’t found your question answered? Don’t worry. There is a website that estimates the size of the Web every day. Current guestimates are between 45 and 50 billion webpages.

What Do Churches Do?

Questions people ask, and advice people give have been around far longer than the web. Some churches like this one major in a far smaller book called The Bible where we have conversations that touch in big questions of life.

• What is this world like?
• Are people good? Are they safe?
• What is good in life? What does it mean to be a good person?

The Bible also deals in God. God is a complicated subject right now in the world but it hasn’t always been this way. We live in an unusually skeptical age where we feel embarrassed to talk about God, or nervous to talk about him because there is so much disagreement and by its very nature dealing with God makes conversations ultimate.

I don’t think we need to be quite so sheepish about this. People have been having these conversations for thousands of years and part of what the Bible does is put us in touch with these conversations.

When people say to me that we can’t talk about God because we don’t all agree, or that we could only talk about God where there is agreement, I ask them if they apply these same rules to politics, or economics, or morality or just about anything else that is interesting in our world. We are awash in disagreements but that doesn’t stop us from talking or acting or voting or buying.

Churches are places where we talk about God and trying to live within stories, stories from the Bible. We don’t literally live out those stories but we try to live in that world.

This might seem strange to you but don’t you all the time see people trying to live within Star Wars or Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. People who live in those games usually really don’t quite believe they are doing it. It’s kind of play acting. In church we live within a story, together with a large community, and we, to a certain degree, not as much as we think we ought to, try to live within its story.

I can understand if you think this is weird. It looks that way to our culture right now. It hasn’t always looked that way. It doesn’t look that way to everyone.

Israel and Philistines Continue reading →