Be Beautiful
Now that I've got my handy-dandy MP3 player, my morning dog walks have been spent listening to podcasts. Mainly sermons. There's two churches I've been subcribing to in particular: Mosaic, based in LA, and Woodland Hills, which is across town. Greg Boyd, the pastor of the latter church has been in the news a lot lately. His new book, The Myth of a Christian Nation, argues that the church should have little to do with government. Not that individuals shouldn't be civically involved, but that the church has no business endorsing particular political views. It's a little different than the Jim Wallis message--that God's politics are more inclusive that just right wing. It's that the business of the kingdom isn't really about politics, but about building a different culture that stands alongside government and interacts with it.
In any case, his August 20th sermon, Being Beautiful, was a particularly striking one to me. Two quotes:
"Jesus doesn't call us to be right. He calls us to be beautiful."
(from a conversation with Rick Warren) "The Bible says the church is supposed to be Christ's body. We've mainly been his mouth."
I appreciated with Boyd has to say, and so thought it worth passing along.