“The persistent goal of biblical economic life is the feast where we are feasting together.”

Trauma is extraordinary, she says, “not because it rarely happens, but because it swallows up and destroys normal human ways of living.” We have a choice. “We can flit from one cause to another or, like Jesus, we can leave our place of comfort and enter into the suffering.”

Church planting in small towns is a long-term process. “These are not areas for someone with a short-term view of growth,” Jeremy Coyer advises. 

“When we enter the new Eden, our Sabbath rest, the final temple, the New Jerusalem, we’ll begin to experience all that God has intended for us all along.”

It’s not as though motherhood makes us more of a sinner; rather, areas of sin we didn’t realize we had are brought to the surface.

“We’re telling people, ‘Everything’s by grace. You’re predestined. Anything good you have is from God alone.’ And then we’re pretty arrogant sometimes in the way we treat other Christian traditions.”

Participants experience the stripping away of pretense as they expose their real selves to one another in a sometimes uncomfortable environment.

And after years of study researchers identified the four things humans need to be happy. Not surprisingly, they’re things the Bible described centuries ago.

Now when members talk about things they miss about Evergreen’s old building, rather than bringing them back to the present, White asks them to share more about what they miss.

The students learning English in a basement room at the church complex grapple tonight with a series of sports-based idioms: “par for the course,” “get to first base,” and “have to punt.” Teacher Faith Limmer explains the last one: “I have class, and I leave all my notes at home. So I have to punt.” …