Reflecting on the revolutionary nature of Jesus' call to all who will follow. Brian McLaren writes, "The uprising begins not with a strategy but with a new identity. So he spurs his hearers into reflection about who they are..." pp27

When we realise that something major is wrong, it takes great courage to stop. Mostly we do more an d work harder, knuckle down and intensify, but sometimes it is time to stop. pp73

A humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a serach after deep learning' Thomas a Kempis

There is no deep knowing of God without deep knowing of self Calvin

to discover myself in discovering God Merton p79

For simplicity oin this side of complexity I would not give you a fig, but for simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have' Oliver Wendell Holmes

Francis Psychological Types Scales / New Indices of Religious Orientation p115

Koinonia - radical participation, intimate communion and deep sharing 137

What one aspect of congreational life do you most appreciate? 141

The phrase anam cara is an anglicisation of the Irish word anmchara and literally means 'soul friend'

Rowan Williams however church is expressed, at a basic level it comprises people who recognise one another as 'gifts'.

I felt thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread - Bilbo Baggins161

Renewal comes from the margin, and rarely from the centre' Prof Stefan Paas 196

The attempted resuscitation of dying congregations is a tragic diversion and not to be confused with resurrection of the Church p202

Discipleship describes inhabiting that abundant life.  Ministry involves building up to church embodythat abundant life. Mission names  the ways that abundant life is practised shared and discovered in the world at large.  3

 Jesus did not fundamentally come to redirect us from judgement and oblivion to safety and sublime bliss. Instead, God always purposed to be in relationship with us and foster our relationship with one another and creation. Jesus came to embodied that purpose, to encounter and challenge all that inhibits it, to withstand and demonstrate the overcoming of those  obstructions, and to restore that purpose in in perpetual   promise.  3

 God of time and eternity, if I love thee for  hope of heaven, then deny me heaven; if I love thee for fear of hell, then give me hell; but if I love thee for thy self alone, then give me thy self alone. Rabi’a 5

 Church-must be regarded as places of encounter for the whole neighbourhood, with a mission to be a blessing to anyone and everyone who resides or spend time there. 9

Mammon is fundamentally the economy of scarcity. It is the world in which there is not enough to go around. Mammon means I must use all my energy making sure that of the limited amount of cake, at least I get enough on my plate. There is also a name for the other  economy, the economy of the manager after he’s been fired. The biblical word for that economy is manna. Manna is the food god gave to the Hebrews in the wilderness: always more than they needed. 13

 It is true that the time when Christianity and citizenship were virtually synonymous has long gone, that regular church attendance is much less common, marks of affiliation, notably baptism, unless the norm, and that recourse to  clergy in times of life transition, especially funerals and weddings, is less prevalent.  32

The church will always remain a pilgrim people. Whenever you meet a bunch of  Christians  who feel they have made it, whether in strength of numbers, firmness of doctrine, righteousness of attitude of purity of life, you can anticipate that pretty soon they’ll be in trouble. Israel was formed on the way from Egypt to the promised land. The disciples were formed on the way from Galilee to Jerusalem. The church becomes one body as it is bound together on its common journey. It is always a work in progress . 143

 Creativity increases with diversity and decreases with conformity.  153

There are very few men who realize what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves entirely to His hands, and let themselves be formed by His Grace. — St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Outward flow

This necessary reciprocity, a pattern of outflow and inflow, is one that many Christians have never committed to, and the whole religion has suffered because of it. I am convinced that in neglecting the need to serve and to pay back, many Christians lose whatever they might have gained in their private devotions; in fact, they live inside a false peace (pax perniciosa, the Desert Fathers and Mothers called it), which is often a very well-disguised narcissism.

A nazereth manifesto - God with Us Sam Wells 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Spiritual-Migration-Religion-Christian/dp/1601427913

Awakening to Our True Self - Rami Shapiro

The term “perennial philosophy” . . . refers to a fourfold realization: (1) there is only one Reality (call it, among other names, God, Mother, Tao, Allah, Dharmakaya, Brahman, or Great Spirit) that is the source and substance of all creation; (2) that while each of us is a manifestation of this Reality, most of us identify with something much smaller, that is, our culturally conditioned individual ego; (3) that this identification with the smaller self gives rise to needless anxiety, unnecessary suffering, and cross-cultural competition and violence; and (4) that peace, compassion, and justice naturally replace anxiety, needless suffering, competition, and violence when we realize our true nature as a manifestation of this singular Reality. The great sages and mystics of every civilization throughout human history have taught these truths in the language of their time and culture. —Rami Shapiro

Spiritual power is more circular or spiral, and not so much hierarchical. It’s shared and shareable. God’s Spirit is planted within each of us and operating as each of us (see Romans 5:5)! Trinity shows that God’s power is not domination, threat, or coercion. All divine power is shared power and the letting go of autonomous power.

There’s no seeking of power over in the Trinity, but only power with—giving away and humbly receiving. This should have changed all Christian relationships: in churches, marriage, culture, and even international relations. Isaiah tried to teach such servanthood to Israel in the classic four “servant songs.” [1] But Hebrew history preceded what Christianity repeated: both traditions preferred kings, wars, and empires instead of suffering servanthood or leveling love.

What if we actually surrendered to the inner Trinitarian flow and let it be our primary teacher? Our view of politics and authority would utterly change. We already have all the power (dynamis) we need both within us and between us—in fact, Jesus assures us that we are already “clothed” in it “from on high” (see Luke 24:49)!

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. —Dr. Howard Thurman

As conscious human beings, our life purpose is to be a visible expression of both the image and the likeness of God. Each of us reveals a unique facet of the divine, what Franciscan John Duns Scotus called haecceity or thisness.  Parker Palmer

St. Bonaventure (1221-1274) called the Trinity a “fountain fullness” of love. [2] God is unhindered dialogue, a positive and inclusive flow, an eternal waterwheel of self-emptying and outpouring love—that knows it can completely self-empty because it will always be filled back up. This is the very definition and description of divine love; all human love merely imitates, approximates, and celebrates this same pattern.

Rohr

God, Evil and Omnipotence By Epicurus c. 341 - c. 270 BC

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?

Salieri presents us with a vivid picture of the piety that reduces God to a means to the believer's own ends. Freud , Marx, and Nietzsche find this sort of piety to be the rule rather than the exception. To see our three atheists as critics of instrumental religion could be to make them instruments for self-examination and sanctification.


 Merlon Westphal

‘I see’, The rabbi smiled. ‘so he disapproves of the god in whom he doesn’t believe.’

PRIDE IN SUBTLE FORMS

THE MAJOR IMPERATIVES WITHIN MATURE DISCIPLESHIP • Be willing to carry more and more of life’s complexities with empathy: Few things in life, including our own hearts and motives, are black or white, either-or, simply good or simply bad. Maturity invites us to see, understand, and accept this complexity with empathy so that, like Jesus, we cry tears of understanding over our own troubled cities and our own complex hearts. • Transform jealousy, anger, bitterness, and hatred rather than give them back in kind: Any pain or tension that we do not transform we will retransmit. In the face of jealousy, anger, bitterness, and hatred we must be like water purifiers, holding the poisons and toxins inside of us and giving back just the pure water, rather than being like electrical cords that simply pass on the energy that flows through them. • Let suffering soften rather than harden our souls: Suffering and humiliation find us all, in full measure, but how we respond to them, with forgiveness or bitterness, will determine the level of our maturity and the color of our person. This is perhaps our ultimate moral test: Will my humiliations soften or harden my soul? • Forgive: In the end there is only one condition for entering heaven (and living inside human community), namely, forgiveness. Perhaps the greatest struggle we have in the second-half of our lives is to forgive: forgive those who have hurt us, forgive ourselves for our own shortcomings, and forgive God for seemingly hanging us out unfairly to dry in this world. The greatest moral imperative of all is not to die with a bitter, unforgiving heart. • Live in gratitude: To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Let no one deceive you with the notion that a passion for truth, for church, or even for God can trump or bracket the non-negotiable imperative to be gracious always. Holiness is gratitude. Outside of gratitude we find ourselves doing many of the right things for the wrong reasons. God is a prodigiously-loving, fully-understanding, completely-empathic parent. We are mature and free of false anxiety to the degree that we grasp that and trust that truth.

We are also too anxious about how we are perceived, about having a good name and about being respected in the community. We see this in Jesus’ warning about how we are to imitate the lilies of the field in their trust in God and his multiple warnings about not doing things to be seen by others as being good. But we’re always anxious about these things, all of us, and our fear here is not necessarily unhealthy. Nature and God have programmed us to have these instincts, though Jesus invites us to move beyond them. More deeply, beyond our anxiety for our physical needs and our good name, we nurse a much deeper fear. We’re fearful about our very substance. We’re fearful that, in the end, we are really only, as the author of Ecclesiastes puts it, vanity, vapor, something insubstantial blown away in the wind. We are so anxious about our substance and immortality and are always trying to create this for ourselves. But, as Jesus, often and gently, points out, we cannot do this for ourselves. No success, no monument, no fame, no tree, no child, and no book, will give ultimately still the anxiety for substance and immortality inside us. Only God can do that. ( In essence, leave some indelible mark on this planet. Guarantee your own immortality. Make sure you can’t be forgotten.) Real consolation lies in knowing that our “names are written in heaven”, that God has each of us individually, lovingly, and irrevocably, locked into His radar screen. Real consolation lies in recognizing that we don’t have to create our own substance and immortality.

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, "Prove that you are a good person." Another voice says, "You'd better be ashamed of yourself." There also is a voice that says, "Nobody really cares about you," and one that says, "Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful." But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, "You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you." That's the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen. That's what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us "my Beloved."

Sometimes we have to "step over" our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there. Then we become the "offended one," "the forgotten one," or the "discarded one." Yes, we can get attached to these negative identities and even take morbid pleasure in them. It might be good to have a look at these dark feelings and explore where they come from, but there comes a moment to step over them, leave them behind and travel on.

Cycle of Grace - John Ortburg from Frank Lake

In the context of Damascus Road experience-“I am more inclined to wards the experience of former poet laureate, Andrew  motion, Who said I’ve seen the light. And it flickers on and off like a badly wired lamp. He goes on to say that this is probably experience of millions of people who inhabit what he calls the ambivalent middleground in religion. Xi