There’s a variety of understandings of when God and humanity were reconciled; here’s a repost of a helpful chart outlining those variety of atonement theories.
Holy Week doesn’t have to be about Atonement
The Church, not the Bible, determines Sin
The power to bind/loose laws is given by Jesus to the Church and can be applied to today’s debates about women, divorcees, LGBT Christians and many other topics that divide us.
Chocolat: Work Out Your Own Redemption
“Chocolat” is about a French Catholic town that is rigidly observant, but a stranger opens a chocolate shop during Lent and breaks the town’s mayor control over the outcasts at the margins.
When Large Church Pastors take the #UMC hostage
This is the FiveThirtyEight of Methodism: the numbers do not add up to the narrative that the UMC wants schism and division.
Tom Oden’s Two-Point Test for #UMC Schism
If a group had set a single criteria for schism…why didn’t they even achieve that before calling for schism in the UMC?
Clarifying that Christian Century article
HX.net was quoted in a Christian Century article about Schism in the UMC and it needs a bit of clarification.
To Avoid Schism, Let the #UMC Play It Out
Seeing church as play allows for “house rules” whereby the United Methodist Church can experiment with possibilities and options for life together, rather than apart.
To keep your Temples, support the Tents
A strong Temple (megachurch) supports a network of Tents (smaller churches), adapts their creative achievements, and scales them up to effective witnesses to Christ in their context. But will they?
A Church in Flow tends to stay in Flow–and that’s bad.
Is your church creating stock online? Or is it just going with the flow? Both are necessary for online engagement, but one is more important–and transformative for your ministry!
If Church is a Play, what Act are you in?
Using the metaphor of a three-act play, one can categorize churches and pastors in ways that reveal differences, strengths, and possible friction points.
