Sam Luce's Blog, page 3

A Prayer to be Offered

Our youngest daughter is headed into the petri dish of junior high, or as the kids call it now, Middle School. This season of life is wild. The boys' voices were cracking, the zits were bursting, braces were gleaming, and feelings are reality. It’s the season of life when your beautiful baby is in the stage where a tadpole is swimming around the pond with back legs but no front legs. It’s an in-between time where so much is learned and where pathways are formed.

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When I was in middle...

The Subversiveness of Art

We need more storytellers.

In Gladwell's newest book, The Revenge of the Tipping Point, he discusses overstory, a metaphor he employs and returns to throughout the book. An overstory is a term that refers to the canopy of a forest that absorbs the much-needed sun and casts a shadow on everything below. The ability for new growth to take place is diminished.

This is a metaphor he uses throughout every story he tells. Gladwell has a unique cadence to his writing. He weaves in and out of generally...

Brave New Church

In Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World, Huxley paints a grim picture of our world with sadness, pain, discomfort, and solitude removed by manufactured means. He showed us his picture of a world in which happiness was the greatest goal. Huxley’s dystopian vision has, in many ways, become our modern reality. This dystopian vision becoming a modern reality so quickly would have been shocking Huxley.

Neil Postman contrasted two dystopian views of the world: Orwell’s world of fear and tyrannical governmen...

The Power of Genuine Connection

What makes Mister Rogers so relevant decades after his show was canceled and years after his death was his presence. In reflecting on his life and legacy. I would argue that one of the most profound things about Fred Rogers was the holistic way he lived his life. His superpowers were humility, empathy, kindness, and presence—in a word, Christlikeness.

Fred’s set was tired, and his puppets seemed to age with him. Although his songs were not the most beautiful, their simplicity, purity, and clarity...

Does Our Desire For The New Come at Too High of a Cost?

The place where I live is stunning. It isn’t modern. It’s old beauty, sometimes broken beauty. Buildings that have stories inside them. Stories that are covered with flaking paint and sheet metal where brick once was. The rolling hills and farms that mark those hills like a patchwork quilt only enhance that beauty. The traffic here does not exist because the beauty is an old beauty. Like two old lovers who eat dinner together in the silent confidence of a love that has endured the harsh winters ...

Theological Bias and Our Unifying Essentials

This guest post is from a friend of mine whose family attended our church for several years. Jenny and her husband Matt have two beautiful kids and were such a blessing to our church community. Jenny is a gifted writer and has published several books, including her latest through David C. Cook, Flash Theology. I would love for you to buy her book, check out her website, and support the good work she is doing for the good of the church and the Glory of God.

Unfortunately, the topic of theological...

Book Review: The Path of Loneliness by Elisabeth Elliot

In the last ten years, I have read more books by dead people than I have by people still living. Here are a few things I have learned in doing that.

You know what you are going to get. - The body of their work is complete. You can judge it for good or ill.

They spoke to the issues of their day. If their book is still in print, the chances are very high that their message was perennial. If their message is perennial, then what they have to say will still be true but will be free of the modern bli...

Reconciliation of Broken Relationships

Our age is one of self-sufficiency and self-reliance, which is not a new human problem, as we will see today. We tend to react to injustice, injury, or insult by defending ourselves and protecting ourselves at all costs. We live in a country where might is right. Where we get punched, we punch back harder. Many times, we have good reason to do so. 

When Nelson Mandela was released from prison on February 11, 1990, he delivered a speech from the Cape Town City Hall balcony. In this speech, Mandela...

Rediscovering the Lost Art of Friendship

Friendship has fallen out. We live in a culture that prizes radical individualism. C.S. Lewis says that friendship and love have no primal urge. 

“Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship. The species, biologically considered, has no need of it. ”

We see in books and movies examples of sexual love and familial love. We see fewer and fewer examples of friendship and love. Sixty years ago, ...

My New Book! Forming Faith is OUT NOW!!

I’m so excited to announce the launch of my latest book, Forming Faith, which I co-authored with two of my friends, Matt Markins and Mike Handler. Our heart behind this project was to help inform with the latest research, inspire with time-tested methods, and educate with engaging stories and life experiences. Each chapter teases out the need for formational environments for our kids that create lasting faith.

Some of the topics we work through are

"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kid...