I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in… but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted. – Jean Paul Sartre In his debate with Ken Ham, American television presenter Bill Nye opened his remarks saying, “Here tonight we’re going to have two stories. And we can compare Mr. Ham’s story to the story fr
The secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company. - Rachel Naomi Remen The topic of creation is arguably the most difficult to address when it comes to secular outreach. On the one hand, the cultures prosaic embrace of the theory of evolution means most people simply accept it
If there’s a God, why’d he make me? All of these flaws is all that I see. –Illenium & Call Me Karizma The ontological self-abandonment of God reveals that God is far from the self-interested being many religionists have made him out to be. Instead, God is other-centered. And yet, this very revelation drives us toward an ethereal riddle that tra
If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is indeed a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of, but is the very Ground of Being and is inherently, objectively, and concretely on our side. - Richard Rohr In the last few articles, we went on a tour through the doctrine of God, approaching it from the angle of postu
The Christian God is a being of terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust. - Thomas Jefferson What are we talking about when we talk about God? The answer differs depending on who you are and who you are interacting with. For the traditional Christian talking about God revolves around exploring his attributes such as omnipotence
"Because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord… I have lost all things." — Paul The absurdity of life is an experience—or a way of being—that many of us born and raised in Christianity are entirely unfamiliar with. We can dialogue back and forth about it in an abstract sense, but we can never truly experience it. However, t
"If we distance ourselves and our point of view, a culture will always look peculiar to us." — Shahar Fisher We are nearly ready to begin reimagining Adventism. So far, we have seen three very important points that call us to reimagine our evangelistic approach. The first is that the secular mind is immersed in absurdity—an experience most people o
“Fundamentalists live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.” — Amos Oz The state of absurdity (the tension between meaninglessness and meaning) is a very real experience that must be understood and appreciated by Adventists if we wish to develop a meaningful approach to evangelism in the secular spher
“Meaningless! Meaningless! ... Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” — The Preacher, Ecclesiastes 1:2 NIV Through the years, I have developed a passion and desire to reach those whom the church fails to reach most often—the secular, western individual. I have read and written blogs and books on the topic, listened to and preached
