Things like Facebook and Instagram have trained us to relate to one another according to the strictures of digital life: as it relegates irrelevant and anomalous data to the nether-regions of the web, and heightens false binaries and limited drop-down options as a way of answering existential questions about how one dates, sleeps, believes, votes, thinks, feels, and furnishes a bonus room.

“At the end of the day, it took leaving my tradition, my calling, the whole of my identity and religious upbringing; it took leaving God in order to find God. It took leaving my tradition to find my tradition, to find my calling and the whole of what it means to believe in something, on purpose, because you choose to, and not because you have to or even because you always want to. “

What if we’ve been misunderstanding the point of sin? What if this concept, instead of inviting normal people with long commutes and weird family baggage to blame themselves on a cosmic scale for coming up short, is actually about giving people a way of externalizing their failure and pain onto something we can universally struggle against, together?

Pastors and other ministers, you aren’t the problem; the story is the problem. So let’s put this story to death. Because this story, like the one about the quality of your sermons that is keeping you up at night and emailing you in ALL CAPS on the weekend, has nothing to do with what the homeless, crucified, 1st-century rabbi probably invited you to do with the whole of your life. Arguably, the thing to which that rabbi called you, however long ago, was to resist this kind of story with the whole of your being, to sacrifice it (and not you) on the altar of liberation and to invite others into that same kind of resistance.

"What if your church actually practiced the teachings of Jesus together, even if those teachings came in direct contrast to the teachings of what it means to be happy, healthy, and wealthy in a version of America that no longer exists?"

Whenever parents find themselves demanding things from their children that they rarely or never received from their own parents, who rarely or never received what they needed from their parents, this “destructive entitlement” can maim families for generations.

“Autonomy breeds resiliency in kids and in their individual expressions of Christianity, especially when these kids are rooted in congregations brimming over with institutional warmth and opportunities for non-parental intergenerational relationships.”