Presby-Musings

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality:  Unleash A Revolution In Your Life in Christ by Peter Scazzero, Thomas Nelson 2006 A couple of years ago, I read Peter Scazzero's book, "The Emotionally Healthy Church" right before I became the pastor of the church I currently serve.  It was a timely read, to be sure.  Scazzero is the pastor of New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, NY.  New Life is a large multiracial, international, evangelical congregation.  In "Emotionally Healthy Church," Scazzero relates how both he and his church began exhibiting signs of poor emotional health.  He had become a workaholic, busy doing the things of God and not paying enough attention to simply being with God.  His church in turn had become a dysfunctional family of faith, focused on the wrong things and struggling to be the church together.  In "Emotionally Healthy Spirituality," Scazzero relates his own personal journey toward spiritual health as the hard lessons he le...

I don't know.   Jesus looks sort of natural with a rifle in his hands, don't you think?

  A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming Our Faith by Brian McLaren (HarperOne, 2010).   Brian McLaren has been under fire these past few years.  He's been called a heretic (one of the more kindly monickers), and been likened to the anti-Christ and/or Satan.  In his "friendly" note to his critics, McLaren offers this bit of advice to those who have attacked him for his ideas and thoughts on Christianity and the people who call themselves Christians.  "I repeatedly tell people, if they are happy and confident in your approach, that they stay with it and ignore me, my work, and my friends entirely. I am not here to steal any of your "market share" or do you harm in any way."   Sadly, the vitriol and the hate speech that is leveled at McLaren almost exclusively comes from "Christians" and "Christian" leaders.  Having grown up in a fundamentalist Baptist culture, I am familiar with the fear-mongering that ...