Let's Chat about the Church
join us for an HT Live with Sara Billups, author of Orphaned Believers
I’ve always been a bit of a question-asker. (Often to the dismay of teachers and supervisors…) For the most part, my questions have been good, helping me maintain a posture of curiosity about God, myself, and the world. But over the weekend, I shared with a few close friends that for the last year many of my questions about the church had developed a critical cloud—and I did not love it. I did not like the cynicism that was brewing, closing my soul and imagination to the possibility of a kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven.”1
God is kind, helping me hold my questions while also bringing the goodness of his people to my attention. It’s strange how hurt and hope can co-exist, and maybe that’s our only way through. Maybe the way forward is to see ourselves in all our fullness (even the ugly bits), to hold ourselves in the middle of that story, while also letting hope rise as we lean toward the image Jesus gave us for a community of believers intricately woven together as “I am in them and you are in me, so that they may be made completely one.”2
I know I’m not the only one who has or is or will someday wrestle with the church at large and knowing their place within it. But I want to be part of the conversation that holds the questions while still clinging to the hope.
So…let’s talk about the church. On Friday (12 pm EDT), a writer friend of mine, Sara Billups, is going to join me and HT’s paid subscribers for live Zoom gathering to talk through not only her book Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home but also what it looks like to see our flaws but still retain hope in the person of Jesus, the Christian story, and the people of God. I’d love for you to join us.
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