My experience as a pastor is lots of people have really toxic, dangerous, psychologically devastating images of God in their head, images of a God who's not good.

A lot of Christians have been taught a story that begins in chapter 3 of Genesis, instead of chapter 1. If your story doesn't begin in the beginning, but begins in chapter 3, then it starts with sin, and so the story becomes about dealing with the sin problem. So Jesus is seen as primarily dealing with our sins.

I like to say that I practice militant mysticism. I'm really absolutely sure of some things that I don't quite know.

It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: 'Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.' At the same time, it often appears that those who talk the most about relieving suffering now talk the least about heaven when we die.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

The fundamental story arc of the Bible is God is passionate about rescuing this world, restoring it, renewing it.

Culture is already there and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from two thousand years ago as their best defense. When you have in front of you flesh and blood people who are your brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, co-workers and neighbors and they love each other and they just want to go through life with someone.