What do you see when you look at another person? When you look at someone you love, or when you look at someone you are scared of? What if we learned to see everyone first and foremost as a beloved child of God, carrying the foretaste of future glory within their fragile and fallible form….
What Actually Is Masking? The Camouflaged Self An Illusion of Choice with Masking What Does Masking Feel Like? Carrying The Shopping When Can I Be Me? What Do We Mean When We Talk About Integrity? Rethinking Integrity in Relationship to Masking Moses, Jesus, and The Veil Accepting a Hidden Identity Who Gets Let In and…
Be aware that this article includes references to abuse, assault, and rape. As usual, this article and all my work represent my own views and are not an official Salvation Army position. Ruth is not really a love story, even though people have turned it into one. The more you read it, the more you…
Sanctification is the way Christ makes us holy. It is a gift from God. But it is not a gift given for our sake. We are made holy for the sake of other people. There is a fresh reality that comes from sanctification. Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we are turned from strangers…
Mary Magdalene is one of my favourite people in the Bible. She is named more times than almost any other woman in the New Testament. Mary Magdalene was the apostle to the apostles, a survivor of trauma, and is a patron for all women in ministry. She is also one of the most consistently misrepresented…
Guest Author Post by Lieutenant Chelsea Brevitt Neurodiversity, Church, and Belonging In recent years, the church has begun to ask deeper questions about belonging. As congregations grow more aware of differences, conversations about inclusion have moved beyond physical accessibility to the inner life of faith itself. One of the most important of these conversations concerns…
There are no priests needed in The Salvation Army. That time has gone. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ has changed that. But still the language of priesthood has clung on in Christian churches and ideas of ministry. No Priests Needed – Everyone Is a Priest When the Army first began, it pushed back…
In Luke 19, we find the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus, the tax collector. This is one of those stories that many of us learned as children. Zacchaeus is a short man who wants to see Jesus, and so climbs a tree. Jesus sees him, calls to him, has dinner with the little reprobate, and…
The staggering expansion of the early Salvation Army from the United Kingdom to the rest of the world was driven to a great degree by individual initiative rather than formal planning. The story of the Army in Jamaica is an example of that kind of faithful initiative and personal commitment to evangelism which shaped the…
This is the fourth and final part of a series on the inclusion debate. You could read this as a standalone, but it will make more sense if you read the other three first. I start this article by suggesting how the early Church approached their scripture reading and what that can mean for us…