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

Sermon: The Twist
In this sermon clip, Greg Boyd discusses how when you read a book with a twist ending, the ending reframes the entire story. The Bible is no different. In this sermon, Greg shows how Jesus’ message reframes how we are to understand the Bible, and he shows us why the Anabaptists shared this belief. You…

The One True Image of God: God’s Self-Portrait, Part 4
This point is emphasized throughout the New Testament because, if we don’t get this, we are left to our own imaginations about God, and we’ll draw from a multitude of different sources to construct a mental picture of God that will, to one degree or another, fall short of the beauty of the true God…

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…

Changing Your Mind
Mark Moore is a man who has changed his mind about a lot of things which is somewhat extraordinary these days. Change can be costly and painful and this was certainly true for Mark. He previously pastored Providence Community Church in Plano, TX, where he pastored for eleven years based upon a set of theological assumptions…

Podcast: If Jesus is the Word of God, Why Call the Bible the Word of God?
Stories and words and Bible nerds. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0459.mp3

Gospel “Contradictions” and Orality Studies
* This essay has been adopted from G. Boyd and Paul Eddy, Lord or Legend? (Baker, 2007). One of the standard tests historians put to ancient documents to assess their veracity is self-consistency. Generally speaking, fabricated accounts tend to include more inconsistencies than truthful accounts. Hence, the absence of inner contradictions contributes to a positive…