We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

“You” Means “Y’all”
Justin Hiebert over at Empowering Missional wrote a piece last week titled The Bible isn’t for you. Justin rightly points out that our individualistic mindset has caused us to misread huge portions of the Bible. He challenges us to read the Bible as a community rather than as individuals. It seems like a small thing, but it has important implications not only for how we read scripture, but also for how we understand ourselves and our mission in the world.
From the blog post:
If we leave the focus on the singular (what you personally need to do) it is really hard to build genuine community. We entrust that each person has to do it all, and do it all by themselves. But then when we gather, we are not a community but a collective of individuals. God calls us to more than collective individualism but to genuine community. A place where people are transformed together into the perfect reflection of Christ in the world.
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Community, Individualism, Justin Hiebert, Missions
Related Reading

Conflicting Pictures of God
In my ongoing reflections on the ReKnew Manifesto, I’ve spent the last two posts (here and here) arguing that nothing is more important in our life than our mental images of God. If so, then the all-important question is: what authority do we trust to tell us what God is like? To most evangelicals, the…

Is There an Actual Satan?
Roger Olson wrote an excellent piece on how contemporary Christianity has tended to ignore or altogether extract Satan from the Biblical text. He explores some of the possible reasons for it and also discusses his own journey as he wrestled with the belief in the demonic realm. Really interesting. Here’s a personal experience of the…

Jesus, the Center of Scripture
Paul declared that Jesus was nothing less than the very embodiment of all of God. This distinction of “all of God” is important for us to understand what it means for us to see Jesus and God rightly. Battling proto-gnostic teachers who were apparently presenting Christ alongside other manifestations of God, Paul declares “in Christ…

Why do some of Jesus’ parables depict God in violent ways?
Greg deals with the question of what it means that some of Jesus’ parables seem to depict God in violent terms. In addition to getting an answer to this question you’ll be treated to a window into Greg’s graceful way of moving through the world. Really classy. Enjoy!

The Cruciform Beauty of Horrific Divine Portraits
“Only a person who is aware of the crucified Christ can properly understand Scripture.” Luther (Table Talks) In the last three posts I’ve been wrestling with how insights from Matthew Bate’s book, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation might help us interpret violent portraits of God in the OT in a way that discloses how…

A Review of a Review of Benefit of the Doubt
I’d like to offer a brief response to a curious on-line review of Benefit of the Doubt, published on thechristians.com. It’s titled, Which came first, Jesus or the Bible? A clever heretic draws a false division between God and Scripture. That “clever heretic” would be yours truly, and I allegedly draw this false division in…