The good folks at the library at Austin Seminary let me and a buddy rummage through a bunch of old books and take our pick. Here are just some of the spoils.
Some really interesting ideas on meeting neighbors and forming community right where you live (can’t remember who shared this originally): Stoop Coffee: How a Simple Idea Transformed My Neighborhood.
From a few years back: Alan Jacobs on exhaustion, its causes and treatments
Finished reading: The Art of Pastoring by David Hansen 📚
An instant classic. I knew a few chapters in that it would end up on the Mount Rushmore of pastoring books, alongside Senkbeil, Neuhaus, Eswine, and Wells.
Finished reading: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman 📚
A splendid book that develops several lines of thought from his earlier (and also great) 4000 Weeks. (His recent talk here in Austin was a brilliant introduction to his thought.) Burkeman’s ‘imperfectionist’ approach is a refreshing intervention into the productivity conversation. Though he patches his philosophy together from a range of sources (e.g., Zen Buddhism, the stoics, self-help gurus, etc.), I can’t help myself from seeing the clear connections and deep resonances with a Christian vision of reality, as I’ve gestured at before.
The less said explaining the sacraments, the better. Pastors administer the sacraments, and people want to know what they mean, so we do need to explain them. But for the most part I just let the sacraments be. They have their own power. They are older than we are, more important than we are, more powerful than we are, and they will be in the church, serving the church and God’s people, long after we are gone. Our job is to administer them as humble servants, prudently, with all the respect, order and modesty they deserve. […]
Sacraments are funny things. They are short and simple, they involve the simplest elements in our environment, and they require few words. The more we get out of the way the better. Yet they change people. People remember them for their whole lives.
Respect.
At the heart of the life of the church is the eucharistic celebration, in which those who gather around the Lord’s table are taken up again and again into his sacrificial action, made partakers of his dying and of his risen life, consecrated afresh to the Father in and through him, and sent out into the world to bear the power of cross and resurrection through the life of the world. This is how the Eucharist is interpreted in the great consecration prayer (John 17). The church represents the presence of the reign of God in the life of the world, not in the triumphalist sense (as the “successful” cause) and not in the moralistic sense (as the “righteous” cause), but in the sense that it is the place where the mystery of the kingdom present in the dying and rising of Jesus is made present here and now so that all people, righteous and unrighteous, are enabled to taste and share the love of God before whom all are unrighteous and all are accepted as righteous. It is the place where the glory of God (“glory as of an only son”) actually abides among us so that the love of God is available to sin-burdened men and women (John 17:22-23). It is the place where the power of God is manifested in a community of sinners. It is the place where the promise of Jesus is fulfilled: “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). It is the place where the reign of God is present as love shared among the unlovely.