Realigned
Reflections After Lent
“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”—Steve Jobs
I’m back.
My last post here was on February 13th; a few days later, we entered the Lenten season, which began on Ash Wednesday and officially ended on Easter Sunday.
Normally, I would’ve kept everything going. That’s how I’m wired.
I like consistency.
I like structure.
I like staying on schedule.
But information alone won’t form us. In fact, when we’re constantly inundated with it, it can actually work against the kind of formation we’re aiming for.
So, this year, I took a different approach; I wanted to give myself and our church the margin to stay focused on the Lenten season, so I paused my Substack writing.
After going into the season feeling a little off, I feel realigned coming out.
This weekend in our first post-Lent series, we’re re-entering Church in the Wild, our deep dive into the Book of Acts. After spending the past several weeks exploring the Gospel story, we return to Acts, the story of how ordinary people filled with extraordinary power bore witness to Jesus in hostile territories around the world.
In preparation, I created a Bible Reading Plan for the month to serve as a refresher on chapters 1-3 we covered last year. If you missed Week 1 of the plan, you can catch up on the daily readings on YouTube and be on the lookout for Week 2, which drops Sunday evening.
Inner Circle Insider
Currently Reading: Preaching in a New Key: Crafting Expository Sermons in Post-Christian Communities
This book was highly recommended by several people I trust and has been on my list for some time, so I’m excited to finally get around to it. It feels right on time, given the cultural moment we find ourselves situated in.
He writes:
“There is no such thing as culturally neutral preaching. We need to calibrate expository preaching to the context in which we preach. So much has changed, and the preaching conversation has not kept up. It seems to me that most of the preaching in the West is calibrated to Western culture at the turn of the millennium, if not earlier.”
Translation: Culture has changed, but our approach to preaching has not. We are preaching to a world that no longer exists.
And even if you’re not a preacher, this still affects you.
The way Scripture is taught shapes what you believe, which ultimately shapes how you behave, and it’s hard to live right if you believe wrong.
For those looking for deeper engagement, I’ll be sharing reflections like this on my paid channel called The Inner Circle. It’s a space for more in-depth thoughts and ideas that don’t always fit into the other writing channels.
You can join The Inner Circle for $5/month or $50/year.