More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Winn Collier
Read between
July 25 - September 3, 2024
In 1830, Joshua Pilcher, a frontiersman who walked alone across the expanse of western Canada through waist-high snowdrifts in the brutal winter, penned a letter that eventually landed on President Jackson’s desk. Pilcher described the wonders: “The Flathead Lake and its rich and beautiful valley…vie in appearance with the beautiful lakes and valleys of Switzerland.”
Gregory of Nyssa or Ephraim the Syrian or any of the other great Eastern fathers and mothers of Christianity,
Prayer wasn’t something he did—it was something he was.
Finney’s dad, J. E. Stiles, a prominent figure in the early days of Pentecostalism, wrote an influential book, The Gift of the Holy Spirit,
Traina, up in front of the class, had recently published Methodical Bible Study,
lapsarianism.
Huh?!
George Buttrick.
The Interpreter’s Bible.
“He Refused to Be King,”
we are ever to crown Jesus as king of our hearts, it will happen “among confession and tears and great laughter.”
For two hours every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, I walk through the neighborhood and make home visits. There is no way that I can preach the gospel to these people if I don’t know how they are living, what they are thinking and talking about. Preaching is proclamation, God’s word revealed in Jesus, but only when it gets embedded in conversation, in a listening ear and responding tongue, does it become gospel.
Karl Barth
Barth’s Epistle to the Romans.
In reading Barth, I realized that for most of my life the people I had been living with and who had taught me had been primarily interested in getting the truth of the gospel and the Bible right, explaining it and defending it. (My parents were blessed exceptions to all this.) Barth didn’t have much interest in that. He was a witness….Barth wasn’t indifferent to “getting it right,” but his passion was in “getting it lived.”
anti-Pentecostalism he encountered in seminary—an attitude that he considered snobby ignorance masquerading as biblical conviction.
Guilty!
Harald Bredesen, a Lutheran minister who later became known as “Mr. Charisma”
If I were to define what for me makes up the core Pentecostal identity, it is the lived conviction that everything, absolutely everything, in the scriptures is livable. Not just true, but livable. Not just an idea or a cause, but livable in real life. Everything that is revealed in Jesus and the scriptures, the gospel, is there to be lived by ordinary Christians in ordinary times. This is the supernatural core, a lived resurrection and Holy Spirit core, of the Christian life. What Karl Barth expressed dialectically as the “impossible possibility.” I had always believed that. I believed it
...more
The "more" that I say I want but get squidgy and fearful when in its presence.
The retreat week began with silence, forcing the thirty seminarians to dislodge any theological posturing. Eugene continued, After awhile no one knew what anyone’s bias was, where he was from, how good he was, because if you can’t talk pretty soon you’re all equal. After hours of this the experience of the mystic fellowship of the Christian Church began to be felt.
Eugene’s ministry: silence as an essential antidote to overly theologized postures (hearing from God is more essential than talking about God) and suspicion toward our ingrained ideas
But somehow the snow isn’t as pretty in the city. Snowflakes weren’t made to caress steel towers and soulless cement. They only make them look a little more gaunt and make the cold a trifle more severe. Snowflakes were made for rolling meadows and living trees and black earth that teems with life. Snow is winter’s robe for sleeping nature. But put the garment on steel stuff and it’s like draping a soulless mannequin with the loveliest creation from the Fifth Avenue salons—they don’t exactly enhance one another. Snow in the city becomes like the city—dirty, unwanted, with no
...more
Eugene’s brain into high gear. His master’s thesis, “The Doctrine of Salvation in the Qumran Community,”
Knowledge wasn’t just storing up information in a mental warehouse. It was the disciplined practice of thinking, imagining, formulating, testing for the truth. And teaching wasn’t just getting information or data into students’ minds. There was something deeply dialogical involved, as words sparked into meaning and started truth fires that blazed with comprehension.
Truth fires.
Eugene noticed how little God had to do with any of it. He sensed something elemental had shifted—from God, the Cross, the Resurrection, and the living Spirit, to finding out what people wanted. And then giving it to them.
The community did not need a church to craft little programs to assuage their consciences or perceived needs for safety. It needed the church to invite people into a new reality ruled by the kingdom of God. Christ Our King needed to worship.
fiction.
Hilarious !!
“Those two years of Tuesdays…clarified what I was not: I was not primarily dealing with people as problems. I was…calling them to worship God.” Worship was the call. Worship was the work.
the kind of pastor he wanted to be: slow, personal, attuned to God and to the lives of those in his parish. Eugene wondered if it was possible to transform from a competitive pastor to a contemplative pastor—“a pastor who was able to be with people without having an agenda for them, a pastor who was able to accept people just as they were and guide them gently and patiently into a mature life in Christ but not get in the way.”
For Whyte, Scripture was not a book to dissect but the widest realm possible in which one’s entire life would be lived. Eugene entered this world with Whyte, offering a stunning—and revealing—observation: “The scriptures had become autobiographical to me.”
Scott Peck’s People of the Lie,
“Because,” Eric said, “he was also the son of a priest.” Eugene melted. That was the day he determined to write a book on Jeremiah (what became Run with the Horses, which contains this dedication: “For Eric, also the son of a priest”).
Lord Jesus Christ Word from the beginning Word made flesh Shape words also into speech and bring them to print that tell the truth and speak your glory. Amen.
Dostoevsky,
The Idiot.
the world of spirituality and religion, reduction and oversimplification are just endemic, and the minute that happens, we lose our participation. We stand off at a distance and criticize and evaluate the options.
Smooth Stones
Long Obedience in the Same Direction (mining
Traveling Light, Run with the Horses, and Earth and Altar.
Steve, yesterday, told me [about the view of ministry] and what he experienced here, where I am not trying to do very much, but am looking for what the Spirit is doing. Well, I’m glad he sees that and wants it. I think he knows, at least a little anyway, of how difficult it is—but more of the difficulty is inward, the struggle to be here, stay out of the way, and to pray without forcing anything—or running out and contradicting by action what I enter into by prayer.
Contradicting by action what I have entered into by prayer.
The Jesus Way
Wendell Berry novel, The Memory of Old Jack.
Reversed Thunder, unfolding the praying imagination by
Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer.
Desmond Tutu, whom he heard speak at Hopkins. Tutu was a preacher—passionate and simple. A moral life
now I reflect back on yesterday—the bittersweetness of each Sunday—the energy and sense of reality; and the hurt of so many absences. Why isn’t everyone there? Why isn’t that sanctuary full on Sunday morning? If worship is as good as people say it is, if I preach this well, if the community is flourishing—why aren’t more people pulled in, more people faithful? This is a deepening hurt and sorrow. I feel the personal rejection, but also the God-rejection—it is not me they are being so feckless with, but God. Do they have any idea of what they are missing? What a poor trade they are making?
“Doesn’t my husband have the cutest little hind end you’ve ever seen?” Eugene turned every shade of red.
Sounds familiar
Spectator Bird aloud to each other, they found parallels
Reading Anne Tyler’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Breathing Lessons stoked
1982, Eugene wrote Traveling Light, based on Galatians, placing the texts he’d written for his
1991, Eugene wrote an article for Christianity Today titled “Listen, Yahweh,”
Walter Wangerin.” “Yes, Walter and I are
