Jesus still has a really great reputation and the Spirit is still moving. I've got a lot of hope for a generation that takes Jesus seriously, once again.

There are congregations on nearly every corner. I'm not sure we need more churches. What we need is a church. I say one church is better than fifty. I have tried to remove the plural form churches from my vocabulary, training myself to think of the church as Christ did, and as the early Christians did. The metaphors for her are always singular - a body, a bride. I heard one gospel preacher say it like this, as he really wound up and broke a sweat: "We've got to unite ourselves as one body. Because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming back for a bride not a harem.

Karl Barth said it well: "We have to read the Bible in one hand... and the newspaper in the other." Our faith should not cause us to escape this world but to engage it.

The question for me is not are we political, but how are we political? We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage.

The more you look at the death penalty, that's where you see that we're actually not killing the worst of the worst. We're killing the poorest of the poor. Where actually one of the biggest determinants of who gets executed is how many resources they have to defend themselves.

There's something beautiful about that Scripture that says, "Your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams" (Acts 2:17). We need each other. There is power when the old and young dream together.

It is the church's responsibility, the government's responsibility, and the personal responsibility of every one of us to love.