Every Sunday, we’ll be posting articles and links that are saying something important about church, culture, and mission. Here’s what resonated with us this week on the web:

Church & Theology

Scot McKnight quotes J.I. Packer’s response to the ongoing conversation around Anglicanism:

Anglicanism is first biblical and protestant in its stance, and second, evangelical and reformed in its doctrine. That’s a particular nuance within the Protestant constituency to which the Anglican church is committed – the 39 Articles show that. Then, thirdly, Anglicanism is liturgical and traditional in its worship.

John Chandler writes at V3 Movement about preaching every Sunday – and why you don’t need to do it:

I love everything about preaching—planning sermons, studying and research, Sunday delivery, feeling spent on Sunday evening—all of it.

I’d love to do it every Sunday, but I believe that it’s not best for me to do so. It’s also not the best thing for our church community Austin Mustard Seed. As I have written before, we believe that our liturgy is a time for all to participate. We include the role of preaching in that.

Blind Man At The Gate (Brian Zahnd) offers a few verses about the Peace Donkey on Palm Sunday:

The king approaches on Palm Sunday
Forsaking the glorious war horse
To ride a ridiculous peace donkey

Gentle as the wings of a dove
Inaugurating the reign of love

News & Views

Peri Zahnd presents a Christian perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

I love the Jewish people. I love the state of Israel. There is something wonderfully unique about that land — it’s holy, it’s mysterious, it’s beautiful. But there is something deeply troubling about Israel, something you just can’t ignore. It’s the fact that there is another people — another ethnicity, encompassing two other religions — who live in the land in a way eerily similar to the museum that so inspired me. They live trapped behind walls, imprisoned. They live in Gaza, they live in the West Bank, they are the Palestinians. They are, for the most part, not citizens of Israel, but subjugated, victims, and suffering.

Dave Eggers interviews Sufjan Stevens at The Guardian about his new album:

The result is a tight 11-song cycle, 42 minutes that are at once brutal and beautiful, obsessed with grief and death but absolutely cathartic. For Stevens, the chaos of it all had been shaped into something with boundaries and something like clarity. “At the end I could speak for it,” he says, “for the sadness. It was dignified.”

Jonathan Storment reviews A.J. Swoboda’s new book, A Glorious Dark at Scot McKnight’s blog:

Our churches have created cultures where it is not okay to not be okay.  We have crosses on our steeples and around our necks but not in our local church culture.

This is how Swoboda says this:

We do Christianity the way many do pornography: glossy, shiny and unreal.  And the results of both are almost exactly the same – momentary bliss followed by a desire to experience the real thing because what we just experienced was a complete sham.

Favorite Podcasts

#TrulyHuman Presenter Leroy Barber on the Seminary Dropout podcast.

Bishop Graham Cray Q & A on the Fresh Expressions podcast.

Partners & Resources

JR Woodward announces the Praxis Church Planting Conference, hosted by V3 Movement.

The Acton Institute reports on an urban Methodist church that decided to “stop helping people.”

Pres. Alistair Brown writes at Northern Seminary about Y2K and Good Friday.

On The Missio Blog

On the blog this week, we continued our ongoing series on the topic of #TrulyHuman:

Becoming #TrulyHuman…Together, by Tara Beth Leach.

A #TrulyHuman Podcast: We Interview Cherith Fee-Nordling And Tory Baucum, by Missio Alliance.

Becoming #TrulyHuman: An Eschatology That Integrates Ecological Concerns And Economic Flourishing, by Dr. Charlie Self.

Hiding #TrulyHuman: Grief, Death, And The Motherless Child, by Brandon Wrencher.