HCI History, Part 1: "I'm Calling You to Start a Healing Center."

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HCI History, Part 1: "I'm Calling You to Start a Healing Center."

It all began when I married Sam. I was a single mother of a three-year-old and was in the dissertation-writing phase of my Ph.D. program at Stanford. To marry me, Sam had to leave his beloved Virginia and move across the country. We married in Los Angeles County in Glendora, the town just north of where I had grown up. After the wedding, Sam moved into my tiny townhouse on the Stanford campus with Nina and me. (That story is told in Crossroads Before Me.)

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Urbana 2022, Part 2

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Urbana 2022, Part 2

I awoke with the sun, feeling more rested than I had in months. Today was the day we would begin ministering to students. I called Christina, and we agreed to meet in the hotel lobby in an hour. I went down to the restaurant for breakfast. The hostess sat me at a small table. I ordered a platter of fruit, then noticed a woman about my age sitting at a small table about 12 feet away, facing me. Our eyes met.

I called out, “Are you also here for Urbana?”

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How Should We Then Live in This Apostolic Age? (Part Two)

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How Should We Then Live in This Apostolic Age? (Part Two)

Last month we reflected on the sad news that Christendom is dying—that is, the culture, systems, and institutions that develop when Christianity is the dominant worldview. Now, we are moving into a new apostolic age, an age where the cultural vision of reality is opposed to Christianity. We want to live wisely in this new age. How shall we do this?

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Christendom Versus Apostolic Age (Part One)

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Christendom Versus Apostolic Age (Part One)

Recently David Takle urged me to watch a series of sermons that were based on the book “From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age.” I watched the first sermon then switched to the book. It was eye opening. It explained the shifting season we are living in.

It begins with these words, “Every human society possesses . . . a moral and spiritual imaginative vision . . . that is largely taken for granted. It is a way of seeing things.” The entire society embraces this vision whether they know it or not. Once it is settled, it becomes over time, unconscious. When a new vision challenges the old, the original vision will be “reconstituted or overthrown and another overarching vision takes its place.” Our vision “is the basis of our action,” though “for the majority the ruling vision is never examined, because it is not known to exist”. To most people it seems self-evident”.

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Spend Time Interacting with Jesus

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Spend Time Interacting with Jesus

In our final blog, in this series, I want to encourage you to spend more time interacting with God. Rather than talk about the importance of this practice, I am giving you a spiritual exercise that will help you do the very thing I am urging you to do. It is from a new book, Living Fearless by Jamie Winship.

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Ten Things I Learned While Studying Racial Reconciliation by Dan Van Ness

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Ten Things I Learned While Studying Racial Reconciliation by Dan Van Ness

I recently participated in a 12-week Study on racial history, healing, and reconciliation. It was sponsored by the Racial Reconciliation Group (RRG), an informal collection of people initially made up of members of churches in the Northern Virginia area, but with the pandemic forcing them to use Zoom, increasingly from churches across the country. There were roughly the same number of Black people and white people participating.

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Quieting

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Quieting

Today we are going to talk about quieting—the practice of purposefully lowering our energy levels so we can calm and be still. This can take many forms. It can be as simple as relaxing our bodies and being still before the Lord—waiting on him in peace. It can be a pause after a high energy activity or conversation. Our pause can be less than a minute or several days as we move into the practice of solitude. It is a huge subject that I will only touch on here. The best way to learn the value of quieting is to experience it.

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Ruthlessly Eradicate Hurry from Your Life

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Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Ruthlessly Eradicate Hurry from Your Life

Yep. You read that right. “Ruthlessly eradicate hurry from your life.” This pithy quote is a favorite of mine from the inestimable Dallas Willard. Hurry is a towering barrier to the life God has for us. Sadly, many of us, in the words of Richard Foster, quoting Thomas Kelly, “We live so much of our lives in ‘an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness.’”. Some of us are perpetually in a hurry. We might even think that hurrying is good, because in our perception, when we hurry, we can squeeze in one more thing. And isn’t that the object of life, to get more done? To accomplish more?

Well, no. It is not. We are creatures made by God to love and to be loved.

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