Grace is when you know you're loved exactly as you are.

This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

Your life is a gift. Before anything else can be said about you, for some reason the universe (or God, or being, or force, or reality, or whatever you name it) chose to give you life.

What we believe about heaven and hell is incredibly important because it exposes what we believe about who God is and what God is like.

Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain and name him, especially the one called "Christianity.

The Bible itself is a book that constantly must be wrestled with and re-interpreted. ... Bible interpretation is colored by historical context, the reader's bias and current realities. The more you study the Bible, the more questions it raises. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says.

What is God like? Because millions and millions of people were taught that the primary message - the center of the Gospel of Jesus - is that God is going to send you to hell, unless you believe in Jesus. And so, what gets, subtlely, sort of caught and taught is that Jesus rescues you from God. But what kind of God is that; that we would need to be rescued from this God? How could that God ever be good; how could that God ever be trusted? And how could that ever be good news.