I admit it. My relatively comfortable life in America gave me a distorted lens through which I used to read the Beatitudes, the opening salvo in Jesus’ longest recorded teaching in the New Testament. Jesus said things like “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3) and I would…

Just because you’re standing in a kitchen doesn’t make you a toaster. Or a Pop-Tart. When I hear people tell me that their lifelong membership in a church means they’re automatically and obviously Christians, I have to do a little quick translating. I understand that some church traditions teach this, and can explain the theological…

Last weekend, New York Times reporter Ruth Graham held up a mirror to the celebrity culture that formed around former pastor Carl Lentz at the New York franchise of Hillsong church. Though Lentz was canned by the church a few weeks ago after his recent affair became public, the privilege bubble that formed around him…

Something tells me Dietrich Bonhoeffer wouldn’t have been a fan of the Four Spiritual Laws tract. More than 2.5 billion of these tracts have been printed and disseminated over the last few decades. The little booklet sketches four core talking points about the person and work of Jesus (God loves you and has a wonderful…

Self-help pep talks instead of sermons in church. Spiritual leaders intoxicated by access to power. Marrying nationalism with an edited form of Christianity. This was the world in which dissident German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived during the 1930’s and 40’s. He was among those who broke away from the deeply compromised national Lutheran Church…