Wondrous are the works of humility (or thoughts about vocation)

From Word from the Desert, comes this apothmegatum: Wondrous are the works of humility.
There was a monk of St. Anne’s (on Mt Athos), a vessel of grace, who was the first chanter at the Patriarchate. This monk went to the spiritual father of St. Anne’s to make his confession and to ask his advice.
“What kind [...]

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The Evangelism That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Fr John raises the question: When is it proselytizing and when not?. His interlocutors are none too shy: When Orthodox present their faith to other Christians in monological form, it’s sheep stealing. When Orthodox present their faith to non-Christians it’s evangelism.
This paradigm is, of course, built on a dialectic (and an ecclesiology) that [...]

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Progressive Politics, Chiliasm and the Kingdom

Via Tripp, comes a post on Utopia, progressive politics and the Kingdom.
The angst exhibited in the post is fairly typical of what one finds among those evangelicals who are anxious to remain faithful to their core Gospel convictions, but, for varying motivations, want to embrace a more socially activist way of living. And that’s a [...]

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Vocation Again

From the ochlophobist:
Tom would tell me, later in the game, that as a white male, even from appalachia, I stood very little chance of getting tenured anywhere other than an Evangelical Christian college, and that I should thus change disciplines. I wandered about, eventually getting my education in the classics of the West not at [...]

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Congregations Where I’ve Worshipped and Served

Tripp’s recent post on where he’s worshipped got me to thinking about that as well.  Here’s my list:
Woodlawn Christian Church (Wichita, KS–I was on the cradle roll here in the late sixties)
Countryside Christian Church (Wichita, KS–I was baptized here at 7, and ordained here at 24)
Leon Christian Church (Leon, KS–I went here during most of [...]

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Proactive Thought Policing

By now, many of my readers will already know of Dr. Francis Beckwith’s decision to return to the Roman Catholic Church. Beckwith, who taught at Baylor where two of my cousins went to school (prior to Beckwith’s tenure), was originally baptised, confessed and communed in the Roman Catholic Church, but later left for evangelical Christianity. [...]

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Gabe on Convert Stories

Gabe has these probitive thoughts:
. . . [R]eading any convert story, regardless of where the person was coming from and where they wound up, is always something of a task for me. Though Howard’s book doesn’t suffer from this, most conversion accounts—written and verbal—are rife with silliness. I’m still waiting for that Orthodox convert to [...]

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More Thoughts on Vocation

I had ruminated, in an earlier post, about the differences in how I view my vocation now as compared to a young idealistic high school senior fed on an undending diet of rhetorical questions about what I was going to do with “God’s Plan for My LifeTM.”  Reading Trevor’s posts (here and here) got me [...]

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Thoughts on Vocation

Growing up a non-denominational, evangelical, Restoration Movement Protestant, one thing that I had asked me again and again is: What does God want you to do with your life? This was frequently, though not always, used as a device for encouraging young men such as myself to give serious thought to working in missions [...]

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Rich Mullins: Homeless Man

Mullins lived for some time in Wichita, where my family lives, and attended Central Christian Church (which belongs to the group of churches I grew up in).
YouTube – Homeless Man: Rich Mullins Part 1 (7:42)
YouTube – Homeless Man: Rich Mullins Part 2(5:56)
YouTube – Homeless Man: Rich Mullins Part 3a (6:35)
YouTube – Homeless Man: Part 3b [...]

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