My friend Kathy Escobar wrote an insightful post recently about her understanding of church.
Here is some of what she wrote:
the part that makes me sad, though, is that as a culture how little we value alternative forms of church–and not just unique worship services.
there are an awful lot of ways to grow, be challenged, and practice loving God, others, ourselves. in fact, God’s awfully creative like that–showing up in all kinds of unexpected, ordinary, wild, beautiful places that have nothing to do with organized religion.
yeah, small dinner parties are church.
time with dear friends laughing & eating & sharing life is church.
online connections where we gather hope & are challenged is church.
intense theology conversations at the pub is church.
sharing burdens with colleagues at work is church.
offering cups of cold water to thirsty friends on the street is church.
recovery meetings are church.
neighborhood potlucks are church.
regular worship services are church (as long as you talk to someone, ha ha).a whole long list of ways that people gather & find hope & share love are church.
to me, the only for-sure ingredient of “church” is people–beautiful, weird, flawed human beings, some how, some way, gathering with other people, in the midst of the reality of God, giving & receiving love and hope.
This is a guest post by Dan Pedersen. He is passionate about helping people break-free from religious oppression by writing about the true character of God, love. Dan lives in Canada with his wife and daughter. You can find his blog at 
This is a guest post by Joshua Lawson. He is a husband to Sarah and a father to Joshua, Hope, and Allison. Once upon a time he was a halfway decent basketball player, but his dream since becoming a father has gone from playing in the NBA to one day getting a full night’s sleep again. Joshua blogs at 
Those of us Christians who live in the USA often pride ourselves in our “Christian” form of government, and believe that our Constitution and indeed many of our laws are based on Christian principles. Some of us believe that our laws should reflect the teachings of the Bible, or what we suppose the teachings of the Bible to be.
“…As a result, the world we know grows, changes, and develops under its own steam, as it were from within… Apply this to political science and you get democracy: society ordering itself according to its own internal wishes and whims, fears and fancies” (p. 35).
This Guest post is written by Cheryl Petersen, author of 
She is a freelance writer and correspondent for The Delaware County Times. Cheryl’s website is 
But eventually I began to wonder about this entire concept. Are there really special words and special languages which makes a person more acceptable to God? Is there such a thing as a pure textual tradition which can be aspired to or returned to? When people claim this is the case, how do we know that they are capable of making decisions of which is pure and which is not?
How can you know if you, or a friend, or relative, have committed the unforgivable sin?
But be warned.
But there comes a day in the life of every believer when God decided to start working on us with a particular sin. There is no set order or timeframe on sins God seeks to liberate us from. God works with each person in His own time and His own way. But He does work on each one of us. God decides that a particular behavior or thought pattern in our life must change. He wants to make us look more like Jesus, and help us better reveal the light of the Gospel, and to do that, we must straighten out a particular area of our life.
