Becoming a people together
Gordon Lathrop roots his case for in-person worship in scripture and Lutheran tradition.
ecclesiology
We do not read alone
Brad East offers a rigorous argument for the ecclesial context of scripture.
The church's holy, subversive possessions
Ben Dueholm offers a humble apologetics—of faithful actions, not beliefs.
A wisdom ecclesiology embraces the church’s earthly context—but without romanticizing it.
Merciful within limits
Pope Francis's theology of mercy has political implications.
The church I dream of goes out onto the field of battle—not to kill and maim on either side's behalf, but to bind up wounds.
Between Magisterium and Marketplace, by Robert C. Saler
Robert Saler’s two main concerns are theological authorship and how we conceive of the church. The two have an unsettled relationship.
The church is not an ark floating on the top of the waters. It lives and breathes within the waters.
The biggest question about social media and the church is not how the church can harness the power of social media for good ends while safeguarding against bad ones (useful as such discussions may be). It's how social media is changing what it means to be church.
A review of The Shape of Participation
If you share my concern about the theological thinness of much of the current craze of construing Christianity as a practice, get Roger Owens's book. Even more, if you care about the theological identity of the church, you will find The Shape of Participation to be this decade's finest work of ecclesiology.
There is nothing like writing a book called Leaving Church for discovering how many things people can make of a title like that. The church of the title is Grace-Calvary Church in Clarkesville, Georgia. Leaving is what I did in 1997 when I resigned from parish ministry. In the year since the book came out, I have received thousands of letters, most so poignant that I have to hold my heart while I read them.What I read above all is a rich mix of love and grief: love for the mainline churches that have formed the faithful, and grief that so many of those churches have run out of holy steam. The love part makes the grief part hard to articulate.