Matthew Wright > Recent Status Updates

Gamaliel (Paul’s Rabbi), at least portrayed in Acts, advocated the policy of “live & let live.” If people wanted to follow this man Jesus, they could do so. If this new movement was from God, it would prosper; if not, it would fall by its own weight.

For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not "saved souls" being rescued from the world and taken to a distant "heaven," but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

In the modern Western world, "religion" tends to mean God-related individual beliefs and practices that are supposedly separable from culture, politics, and community life. For Paul, "religion" was woven in with all of life; for the modern Western world, it is separated from it.

In Paul's day, "religion" consisted of God-related activities that, along with politics and community life, held a culture together and bound the members of that culture to its divinities and to one another.

Talking About Paul’s Letters:
It is a safe bet to say that these letters, page for page, have generated more comment, more sermons and seminars, more monographs and dissertations than any other writings from the ancient world.

a counselor to listen, prating us, along with pointing questions, eating us in interpreting the Complex plot points of our individual stories, and the puzzle pieces that fit coherently into the hole.

Jesus caused the Holy Spirit by three. Revealing names: comforter, advocate, and counselor. In the long and unpredictable race of the spiritual life, we have been given a comforter to draw near, never leaving us alone in our pain; and advocate to defend us against the harassing constancy of the deceivers, lies;

And those institutions' faults are well documented on the pages of Scripture. Despite his own legitimate criticism of the "church" of his day, Jesus did not abandon it. He kept showing up, kept praying with the people in the pews, kept receiving the Word in the context of brothers and sisters.”

“Second, I want to say clearly that the major problem with “I’m into Jesus and not the church" is Jesus. If you're really into Jesus, you know that the church was never optional in his mind. Jesus was not anti-institutional. He regularly led his followers into the two religious institutions of first-century Judea: the synagogue and the temple.

The Gift of the Holy Spirit means signs, wonders, and miracles. In the greatest miracle of all just might be living in a community of love over the long haul.

The spectacle of Pentecost came in tongue of fire in rushing wind, but the sustaining power of Pentecost came in a community of people, humbly and stubbornly, loving one another. If it’s the power of Pentacost, we are after we’d do well to look as much to the people on our right and left as we do up to the heavens.

You will not be thinking about whatever stressing you today. You will be thinking about people. The people you got to spend your life with. How do you love them or didn’t. How do you prioritize them or didn’t. What you sacrifice to know them more deeply or what got in the way.

“Life is about relationship. On your death bed, you will not be thinking about accomplishments or failure, what you got done or left and done. You will not be proudly or shamefully, skinning your résumé or bank account. You will not be crossing off your to-do list. When the lights are Going Out On Your Number Days, The Side of eternity.

In the early Church, they never imitated the miracles of Jesus, without equally imitating the love of Jesus. They move toward pain, toward hurts, and annoyances, and grievances, toward the one in need. They learned to forgive and ask for forgiveness. They saw the worst in each other and kept choosing love. Power always serves love. Never the other way around. The Bible calls power apart from love a noisy gong.

My deepest transformation requires the intervening rescue of God. And my deepest transformation is Foster and community.

What is the greatest obstacle to our formation isn’t, in fact, culture, clashes, ideological, division, technology, HIGH, jacking, our brains, or wealth, stealing our affection? What if our greatest obstacle is the one, the culture and the Church jointly celebrate: wonder last?

He goes on to admit the immediate gratification of the alternative-that running will provide immediate relief from the awkwardness or pain of remaining, but you're destined to find yourself in this exact spot in the next community.

The modern-day gyrovague is the sincerely committed Jesus follower who finds himself or herself bouncing from church to church. The vow of stability isn't a critique of transience. It's a pathway to spiritual maturity.

He writes of a group of monks he names gyrovagues, a combination of two Latin words, gyro meaning "circle" and vagues meaning "wander." Gyrovagues were those " wandering
in circles."! They were "rootless" followers of Jesus. Saint Benedict comments, "Always on the move, they never settle down, and are slaves to their own wills and gross appetites.

Do you want the fruit to the spirit? And do you want the manifestations of the spirit? Route, your life in a community of Jesus is followers. The fruit and the gifts, character, formation, and supernatural manifestations, all of these grow in the soil of deeply, rooted community.

This is the litmus test of all spiritual formation: is it leading me deeper into community or isolation?

“Many Christians would rather look into their Bibles then into the eyes of a fellow human being. Many Will pray, ‘Lord I want to be close to you,’ Yet never do anything to get close to the people around them. The God has designed it so that the route to Him lies through other people.”

Union with God that doesn’t draw me near to others is not apprenticeship to Jesus, but a distortion of it.

Community is the context of our deepest, and most complete healing.

Therapy; should be for formation, in addition to community, not at the expense of community.

This combination of a culture resistant to formation in community and a church swallowing that false narrative whole has led to a tragic misconception: Much of what passes as spiritual formation today, actually and ironically, resists spiritual formation in community. This misconception is revealed in two subtle deceptions: an individyalized form of wholeness and a solitary way of spiritual devotion.

The church, stripped of the robust value of formation in community, is leaking its lifeblood.

The American church, often captured by the values of broader culture, has become a platform for individual performance more than an academy for discipleship to Jesus. And it doesn't take a social scientist to see that when the church becomes a stage on which a leader performs for an adoring crowd, it destroys both those in the pews and the performer on the stage.