You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you're into a different kind of relationship.

I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."

The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.

The church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired.

The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.

I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again.