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Category: Community

7 Resources for Keeping Kids Safe from Sexual Abuse

We live in an time when media attention raises awareness (and also fear) of childhood sexual abuse. With all the danger we see, how in the world can we keep our children safe? Kathy Milans shares wisdom and tangible resources that will help you keep the children in your life more safe from sexual predators.

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Blessed are the Poor In Spirit

Sometimes, as Christians, we can get really good at navel-gazing. We can get so caught up in the busyness of everyday ministry, that we fail to see the people. One thing that I have often noticed is how easy it is to be so surrounded by church people that we never even encounter the outside world in a meaningful way. For me, the most important question has become, “What am I going to do about it?”

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On Suicide: The Power of Having a Marathon Partner

In the marathon of life, we’re all running the “first one,” and it is filled with countless challenges, unknowns, and “walls” that seem insurmountable. Each of us desperately needs a community that will surround us, love us, encourage us, and remind us that we can do it, to just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

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3 Steps to Make “How Is It With Your Soul?” Work

You know that famous Wesleyan question, “how is it with your soul?” Does anyone else find it to be a daunting icebreaker? I have often heard from small group leaders that it can be a challenge to get their groups to go beyond surface conversations or fill in the blank Bible studies.

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The Hope of our Dust and Ashes: Lent as Preparation for Easter and Resurrection

I was standing there watching people come forward who have become cherished family members to me, and I was dipping my thumb in this glass bowl of pitch black ashes—a symbol not only of penitence, but of mortality. I was making the sign of the cross on their foreheads. Some of them were weeping, but with all of them, the sense of heaviness was as palpable as the deep, familial love we shared.

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Sitting with the Hopeless: Learning to Listen Generously

Will you sit with the helpless ones and hear their cries even if you are powerless to break through the walls that bind them? Will you sit and ache with them so they don’t suffer alone? Will you honor the cries that no one else hears and give validity to their pain? Will you face death with a tenacious hope that resurrection is always possible?

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Rhythms of Grace- Making Room for Christ and Others

Hospitality and care of others always disrupts normal life, and while anticipating that disruption is one thing, restructuring your life to include the rhythms you most need only happens on purpose. We see that it will not be enough to have good intentions about our spiritual growth; if we are not intentional about building these things into our everyday lives, they will not happen.

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There Is No Global Village

I am reading Wendell Berry- “The Art of the Commonplace.” I have read and re-read one piece this week. He is speaking of the general and the particular, that they must be held in tension,

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