Glenn Packiam
@gpackiam
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Lead Pastor @Rockharbor |Sr Fellow @barnagroup |Doctor of Theology @durham_uni |Author:The Resilient Pastor, The Intentional Year +6 others | Songwriter
Costa Mesa, CA
Joined April 2008
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I broke down at wept during this moment (among others) of Eugene Peterson’s funeral yesterday. I have parents who have whispered this message in my heart, and I hope to be one who whispers it to the hearts of others.
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Bible Belt pastors who remain silent re racism cuz you “just wanna preach Jesus”, don’t be alarmed when a generation rejects your “Jesus”.
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Pastors, what if we stop trying to be incredible and just work on being credible?
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Had coffee today with a counselor who attends our church. Part of the convo was his observation about why “doom-scrolling” causes so much anxiety— it introduces us to problems beyond the scope of our agency.
When our awareness outpaces our agency, we are left with anxiety.
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Who is
@drmoore
? He’s the ghost of Christians past. He’s the spiritual heir of Cyprian of Carthage who urged the church to care for the sick. He’s the steward of Amos’s prophetic tradition. He’s the servant of YHWH who hears the cry of the oppressed. The question is, who are you?
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I’m not crying, you’re crying. Watch to the end.
James Corden asked his dad Malcolm, a Christian book salesman, to share some Bible-holding pointers with President Trump.
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You cannot force a paradigm shift for someone else. You cannot coerce an “aha” moment. You can’t bully or shame a person into the light. You can’t produce the fruit of the Spirit in someone else. Let go of pride and grandstanding. Our wrath cannot produce God’s righteousness.
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People, leave
@BethMooreLPM
alone. She left the only denomination she’s ever known and found light & beauty in the historicity & simplicity of the sacraments & the liturgy— & petty people come after her there too. The leaven of the Pharisees is in every tradition. God help us.
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I just had coffee with a young man with whom I’ve been meeting for a few months. When we first began meeting, he described himself as an angry, “extreme skeptic”. Today, he brought his Bible and we talked through tons of questions...and he told me he’s going to get baptized. 🙌🏽
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Justifying the cruelty of separating babies and children from their parents by quoting Romans 13 is the perfect example of breaking the Third Commandment— using the Lord’s name to sanction behavior inconsistent with the character of God IS taking His name in vain.
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Jesus said, “No one takes my life; I lay it down.” (John 10:18)
_____
As a follower of Jesus, I say, “No one makes me wear a mask; I gladly choose to for the good of my neighbors.”
I’m not losing my freedom; I’m using my freedom to “serve others humbly in love” (Gal. 5:13).
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Hear me out:
What if we didn’t make statues of *any* human beings?
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NTW with a savage illustration of inaugurated eschatology pulled from the US election season...
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I’m sorry, but I just can’t trust the pastoral advice books abt leading in a crisis when the author has never led a church thru a crisis. None of us have led through a pandemic, but maybe you should at least have some experience w ministry in a crisis before writing as an expert?
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Because 140 characters isn't enough to say why I
#welcomerefugees
& because I hope the pause won't be permanent:
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The people of the cross. These are our brothers & sisters. They have overcome.
http://t.co/mndIW1FkmN
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We should sing, “Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba...did you know?”
These women were courageous not scandalous. They refused to be left outside the promise. A Canaanite & a Moabite join the lineage of Israel’s Messiah. But all four died not knowing. God works even after we’re gone.
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Don’t confuse charismatic theology w prosperity theology. Charismatic theology is thoroughly Biblical in its belief in a God who is dynamic & active in His world; and it’s Trinitarian in its inclusion of the Spirit’s agency & presence.
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Just a pastoral reminder that the test of Christian orthodoxy is allegiance to Jesus the King, not alignment with the political right or left.
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When God asks a question, He isn’t launching an interrogation; He’s staging an intervention.
“Adam, where are you?”
“Cain, where is your brother?”
“Hagar, where have you come from & where are you going?”
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I believe with all my heart that renewal is coming to the church. But it won’t be the revival of us taking back anything; it’s gonna be the revival of us laying down everything. It’s the church returning to the way of the cross. We are Jesus people.
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Let’s talk abt the “Two Kingdoms” theology that seems to underlie the way some think abt politics—separating a “heavenly kingdom” from an “earthly one”, allowing governments to do what they think is best for their people while the church just worries abt saving souls for heaven.
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Everybody likes the idea of a Kingdom, until the find out it means a cross.
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I am convinced that so many American evangelical academics have no clue how interdisciplinary work actually works. History, sociology, psychology, etc. form a lens to study “lived theology”. To discover toxic forms of lived theology is not to undermine confessional theology. 1/
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Why women in ministry? Why women as preachers? In short: Creation, Resurrection, and the Church. What about 1 Tim. 2? Let’s talk about Artemis.
(Links to follow-up sources in the thread)
______
You don’t have to be persuaded. I just want you to know a diff Biblical perspective.
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SBC folks— it would be *so* much better if you’d say you’re sticking with *a* faithful reading of scripture rather than *the* faithful reading of Scripture in your stance re women preachers/pastors. At best, it seems ignorant of the historic and global church. At worst, it…
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A church begins to die when it becomes more about the content we consume than the community we create by the grace of God.
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What’s the difference between Israel complaining in the wilderness versus Israel lamenting in the Psalms?
Lament vs complaint:
A lament is an appeal to God based on confidence in His character; a complaint is an accusation against God that maligns His character.
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This quote, from Nouwen’s “In the Name of Jesus” rocked me when I read it 12 years ago...and it still stops me in my tracks today.
#love
#leadership
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This is a quick THREAD for people who think “modern worship” or “American evangelicalism” or megachurches are all show and entertainment to “attract” shallow consumer Christians:
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67% of the world's Christians live in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania, compared to 11% who live in America and Canada.
Much of our problem with "the church" is from our vantage point of the church in America. Our pain is real, but our perspective needs to be bigger.
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10 years or so from now, when someone asks what “Gen Z” stands for, we will answer with a straight face: “Zoomers”.
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It's always right to speak for the weak/vulnerable. Don't let anyone tell you its hysteria or divisive. Cast your lot w the weak. Jesus did.
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For Aleppo.
For the Church in Syria, and Egypt, and the surrounding region.
Lord, hear our prayer.
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Connecting the Gospel w the breaking down of ethnic/nationalistic barriers should b the easiest thing to preach— Paul’s done the work for us
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Look who I ran into outside Madison Square Garden?? So great to finally meet you,
@BethMooreLPM
! So grateful for your life, work, and faithfulness.
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When I think about writing a sermon, I think of
@moltmannjuergen
’s advice to young
@MiroslavVolf
about what to do his dissertation research on...
Here’s Moltmann’s statement, and how I think it can be applied to preaching:
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A few additional/clarifying comments re the Last Supper thing:
1. I’m not surprised or even offended. We know what the world does. But I think reading the cultural moment is a key to living faithfully as Christians within it. That’s one reason to offer a comment.
1/4
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“Paul’s conversion wasn’t from Judaism to Christianity— he wouldn’t have seen it like that. Paul’s conversion was from the zeal of religious violence to the loyalty of cosuffering love.” —
@BrianZahnd
in “When Everything’s on Fire”
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We think of salvation as being saved from a place— hell or earth.
But Paul speaks of salvation as being saved from a time— this present evil age.
Even though this present age continues, Christians belong to the Age to Come. We've live in a different time zone.
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Power is a magnifier. The greater the power differential, the lighter your touch needs to be. A nudge can feel like a shove. An opinion can be perceived as an order. If you’re in power, you have to work hard to be gentle and go to great lengths to enable disagreement & pushback.
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In
#Advent
, the church stands between two proclamations:
“God has come!”
and
“Come, Lord Jesus!”
The first grounds our confidence that the second will be answered. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus shape our hope in the return, reign, and renewal to come.
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It doesn’t work to keep saying you’re neutral on social/political issues when you only speak on issues the lineup w one party.
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The default assumption in our day is that all Evangelicals line up w one side. If you say you’re with Jesus, prove it in word & deed.
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In so many pastoral appointments this week, I found myself saying in essence:
God loves you.
He’s not angry at you.
He wants to be with you.
He has bound himself to you.
You belong to Him.
This is not the end.
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The story is not:
God made humans & gave them rules;
They broke the rules;
Jesus came & followed the rules;
Now we don't have to.
The story is:
God made humans to reflect His image;
Our idolatry undermined this call;
Jesus faithfully fulfilled it;
Now we can too by His Spirit.
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When the only devil is the Democratic Party, any false god will do.
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The temptation when a church gains mass is for its gravitational pull to draw everyone into its orbit— come to our events, let us be the center of your community, mission, etc. But the gatherings of a church are training wheels for a life of hospitality & service in the world.
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I cannot begin to tell you what this picture means to me.
__________
The kindness of God has come to me through the kindness of others. May I do the same for someone else someday.
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The church is more than its gathering, but it is not less. The gathered church is the new temple-- the place where God is specially present.
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External success is not proof of inward faithfulness.
Jonah had all the results but none of the faithfulness.
Jeremiah had none of the results but all of the faithfulness.
Cultivate faithfulness.
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Prayer is not like tennis where we send requests over and God volleys back.
Prayer is an invitation into the divine mystery. It’s much more like diving into the ocean. We’re surrounded by God.
Full sermon at
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The church has lost credibility largely because it has mishandled power. We have tried to rise up when we should have taken up our cross in sacrificial love. We believe in Jesus; but our lives look nothing like Him. This is not the kind of Church that makes the gospel credible.
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My parents came over to lay hands on me and pray for my vocal cords. If you never had Pentecostal parents who pray in tongues and kneel and pace and “travail” and wage warfare in the heavens, I don’t know how to explain it to you. But, man, it is awesome. So thankful.
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The problem with discipleship in America is not that we lack the resources to reflect biblically/theologically on relevant issues. Those are plentiful. The problem is that we refuse to listen to anything—even “Biblical teaching”—that contradicts or challenges our tribal identity.
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There are days when I would be in despair if I did not believe in the restoration of all things, in the undoing of death by resurrection.
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I want to listen and learn from more female pastors and church leaders on here. Who should I be following?
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I get my best sermon ideas while working out on Monday morning. Unfortunately it’s for the sermon I just preached on Sunday.
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Seen this meme floating around...Can I politely ask, “Stop.” Especially when you (the creator/sharers of this meme) don’t know what you’re talking about. Have you even listened to the new Hillsong album? It’s stunning. Some of the best theological & artistic writing out there.
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Marie Kondo is basically practicing a secularized Ignatian spirituality that looks to material things not as conduits of joy but as sources of joy, & then turns to minimalism as the answer to the emptiness of materialism.
Augustine’s view of joy/created things would solve this.
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We always think about the questions we have for God...but I wonder if we should pay more attention to the questions God has for us.
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“Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.”
— C. S. Lewis
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Officiated and preached at a really sad graveside funeral for a child today. Said these three things briefly:
1. It should not be this way.
2. It will not always be this way.
3. God is with us every step of the way.
_____
Maybe it can bring you hope today as well.
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The “prodigal son” parable comes as 3rd in a sequence of stories with escalating ratios of “lost-ness”:
Lost sheep: 1/100 = 1%
Lost coin: 1/10 = 10%
Lost son: it seems like 1/2 = 50%
By the end you realize BOTH sons leave the Father’s house, & he goes out to BOTH.
2/2 = 100%
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Why the either/or? I mean, if you follow that logic, don’t stop there: we could say, “That’s not joy/peace/love; that just oxytocin.”
But we don’t. Because the Holy Spirit is the Creator Spirit. He works with and within what he’s created— including our senses/emotions.
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“Believers argue with God; skeptics argue with each other.”
—Eugene Peterson
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How airlines should board the flight:
Group 1: All window seats
Group 2: All middle seats
Group 3: All aisle seats
Wouldn’t that be so much faster?
Other than overhead bin space going to the window seat folks first, what’s keeping us from doing this?
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So, I’ve been thinking a lot about favoritism because I’m preaching on James 2 this week. I used to think the opposite of favoritism is neutrality or evenness. But that’s not how the Bible frames it. After warning against favoritism as a contradiction to the faith, James shows...
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The Gospel is not, “Try harder”.
Neither is it, “Do nothing.”
The Gospel is, “Christ in you is the hope of glory”.
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As a leader, people will frequently ask your opinion about all kinds of things.
The problem is, the more you give it (and you surely do have opinions on lots of things— that’s part of how you ended up becoming a leader!), the more these three things will happen:
🧵 1/4
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Relief and joy. I just turned in the manuscript for book number 7, tentatively titled “Good Shepherds: Leading the Church in a Changing World” !!! It’s about 64,500 words, has 238 footnotes, & features new research from
@BarnaGroup
& stories from pastors in the US, Canada & UK.
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Thinking about what God spoke thru Amos: He hates feast days (national days of prayer) when it masks the oppression of the marginalized.
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We’ve placed so much emphasis on making faith personal, we ended up making it individual. Instead of just telling people to believe for themselves, we’ve given the impression that they have to believe by themselves. But the strength of a community of faith is believing together.
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The Kingdom re-defines “family”. You won’t find much that resembles today’s American Evangelical “family values” in the New Testament— where the nuclear family is fenced off from others or exalted above other relationships.
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I’ve noticed a shift in recent years— or maybe it’s a Southern California thing— where the impulse for church planting is less MISSIONAL (“I want to reach these specific people…”), and more ENTREPRENEURIAL (“I want to do church this specific way…”).
Have you seen that?
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France has historically provided the most vulgar mockers of Christianity— thru literature, philosophy, & art. Most of the West moved from militant atheism to indifferent agnosticism to wounded cynicism. But in some places, crude criticism parades as enlightened progressivism.
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In other words, in the West, you can’t critique or change Christianity without using Christian symbols and impulses. 4/4
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Fear is a liar.
It pretends to know the future.
But it doesn't.
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Lament vs complaint:
A lament is an appeal to God based on confidence in His character; a complaint is an accusation against God that maligns His character.
When the psalmists lament, they appeal to God based on His covenant and character, asking for His attention and action.
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Someone on FB said it’s too soon to say anything about
#JacobBlake
until we “know the facts”.
My response: It’s not too soon to lament a father being shot in the back front of his children.
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All I need in my back each day is my laptop. But what if my kids insist on adding random things to my backpack and I have to take all of it or leave it?
What if what some call deconstruction is really unpacking the backpack of cultural Christianity?
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When we speak up for justice, when we call attention to mistreatment of minorities, that’s not being divisive; that’s being united to the heart of God. It’s not being political; it’s being biblical.
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The “viva voce” is over. I feel so grateful for all your prayers and encouragement and support. It all seems so unreal...I’m just a kid from Malaysia. The Lord is good and faithful. Your friendship has carried me.
(Spoiler: I PASSED!)
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My parents are taking the oath of allegiance to become a American citizens today. 40 people from 17 different countries in the ceremony today.
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I’m out here just trying to make NT Wright proud, gently deconstructing one neo-Platonist view of the after-life at a time. 😂
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There are a lot of people who have never been pastors but have built their entire brand/platform around telling pastors what to do. Some are consultants; some are commentators; some are critics. None are the One who called you into ministry.
Keep following Jesus and carry on.
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…comes off arrogant and dismissive of centuries of women who have preached and led and served in the church and of the thousands who do now all over the world— global Pentecostals are just one example. American Southern Baptists don’t have the corner on Biblical fidelity.
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Listen guys, that was a rad commercial.
#HeGetsUs
[And the infrastructure for follow-up by local churches in the area of each person who goes to the website, etc is pretty well-prepped. Better to pray for God to use these seeds than to critique the scatterer.]
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All dressed up.
It’s almost time!! So thankful to have my family with me, and especially my wife who made me explore UK doctorates and supported me the whole way...
I’ll be making my way to Durham Castle in a minute and then to process into the Cathedral!
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3. If a statement of belonging was the goal— subverting a Christian symbol for a modern message— then it’s fascinating that there’s no more powerful symbol than Jesus’s table…
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We can be unambiguous about naming evil as evil. Don’t hedge or nuance or lecture about history. Nothing— past of future— justifies this. Don’t try to be clever and smart and protect your brand or platform. If you care about justice, name what Hamas is doing as evil. Full stop.
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Happy 50th anniversary to
@profntwright
and his wife Maggie! — What are testimony they are to the faithfulness of God.
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When asked by young leaders how to keep going despite discouragement & difficulty, I think of the 2x Jesus called Peter— the 1st was to become a fisher of men; the 2nd was abt love for Jesus.
Believing in a purpose may get you started, but loving a Person will keep you going.
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In conlusion: It IS good and right that we give more outcry and lament and advocacy for the mistreatment of an oppressed people than we do in situations when the role is reversed. It’s because justice is long overdue.
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