Stake Their Lives On It - Passion 2013

So last week, I did some house-cleaning and said that I could only post once a week in 2013, and now this week I have found myself with almost 10 pages on the subject at hand and have given Dan the week off. Go Figure.

To avoid any unpleasantry today (that comes tomorrow), I'm only going to speak hypothetically -- I'm not going to speak about anyone in particular, but about someone you probably know. I'm imagining a young person either in college or college-aged, and this person spent last week in the Georgia Dome with about 60,000 other young people his or her age. Now, when you mentally conjure this person up, I suspect you think of someone who looks like Rupert Grint, or Matt Chandler, or Angus Jones, or Elle Fanning, or Jennifer Lawrence, or Emma Stone. Not a lot of you imagining single mothers, or young adults with learning disabilities, or lower-middle-class kids who had to take a week off from work to come. Which, let's face it: that's how we want to imagine the church to be. We want the church to be full of people who are the aspirational versions of ourselves, and in some sense that is actually a good thing. It means we haven't stopped believing that the church, somehow, is supposed to be better than real life.   Continue at Frank Turk