generosity

Hello Strangers and Friends!

Today is #GivingTuesday. As we focus today on being generous to those we love and care about, we thought this would be the perfect day to kick off another campaign to share For the Life of the World with your family, friends, and co-workers.

By Joseph Sunde

Amid the array of quaint and compelling Christmas tales, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” continues to endure as a uniquely captivating portrait of the power of sacrificial love.

By Joseph Sunde

For many evangelicals, 2 Chronicles 7:14 has become a predictable refrain for run-of-the-mill civil religion, supposedly offering the promise of national blessing in exchange for political purity.

By Joseph Sunde

True justice begins with seeing and believing in the dignity of every human person. It begins with recognizing God’s image in each of our neighbors, and it proceeds with service that corresponds to this transcendent truth.

When distortions manifest, the destruction will vary. But it always begins with a failure to rightly relate to this simple reality.

By Charlie Self

Christian mission, spirituality, and theology have been navigating between isolated individualism and coercive collectivism from the third century to the present.

Both the Old and New Testaments confirm the necessity of personal faith and repentance toward the Lord as a condition of divine favor and ultimate salvation. Yet an equal number of texts affirm participation in the community of God’s people, with an ethos of humility, love and service.

By Joseph Sunde

In our efforts to serve others and seek justice in the world, we have a remarkable tendency to fall short, no matter how carefully constructed or well intended our plans may be. Across our culture-making endeavors — whether in the family or work, politics and policymaking — we are easily lured by the contours of our own designs.

By Joseph Sunde

“God somehow demands of us so much more than this transactional nature. It is really about the gift that we’ve been given, and the only response we can give back is with extravagance, with gratuitous beauty.” –Makoto Fujimura

We live in a society that has grown increasingly transactional in its way of thinking. Everything we spend or steward — our time, money, relationships — must secure a personal reward or return.

By Joseph Sunde

By Jordan Ballor

By Ray Nothstine

My pastor made a good point in his sermon Sunday that the more secular we become as a nation the less we talk about “abundance.” Instead, the national dialogue of our politics shift to discussions about scarcity. The more materialist and less spiritual we become as a nation, the more inclined we are to fight over the table scraps.