The business of the last six months has prevented me — or rather, I have let it prevent me — from writing many of the posts I’ve had ideas for. I thought it might be interesting to toss out a few of the basic theses I’ve been bouncing around in my head, and perhaps they’ll gel into actual posts sometime in the nearish future.

• Most evangelicals lack a framework for non-extemporaneous prayer. This state of affairs is the understandable, but ultimately tragic, result of a backlash against a form of spirituality devoid of spontaneity. Insisting that the only mark of the presence of the Holy Spirit is spontaneity is dangerous in its own ways, though.
• One fundamental problem with approaching preaching as only or even primarily aimed at communicating information is that eventually, much of that information will simply be known by the congregation already. At which point, the congregation will be bored. Instead, we should approach preaching as means of leading us to worship by means of the proclamation of that truth. Worship is never "old hat."
• Marital friendship advice nearly always focuses on men listening to their wives as the women want. This is good advice. It almost never emphasizes the ways that women might be better friends to their husbands. This is lame.¹
• We need a fuller list of sins to comment on than sexual sins alone. We effectively capitulate to our culture’s tendency to fixate on and centralize sexuality when we make it our default illustration of sin in our sermons, Bible studies, etc. There are plenty of other sins on which Scripture focuses: gossip, anger, pride, envy, argumentativeness, gluttony, and so forth. We should therefore broaden our "vocabulary" a bit.
• We pragmatic American types often mistake "applicability" for "practicality" — they’re not the same (though we often conflate them). "God is holy" is immediately applicable, because it informs how I know him. It may not be "practical" in the sense of giving me three principles for being a better husband, though.²
• It is easy to miss, given the enormous cultural changes that have taken place in the last two thousand years, just how thoroughly Jesus upended all our views on what is acceptable and what is not.
• There is no gospel without the resurrection. So why is it so frequently missing or trivialized in our presentations of the gospel? Why do we so often hear summary phrases like "from Jesus’ birth to his death" (offered by a preacher I really respect)? Where did 1 Corinthians 15 go missing? Why has the resurrection been diminished to being simply a demonstration that the actually important part — the cross — basically "worked," rather than one of the central affirmations of our faith?
• Preaching longer passages would be really helpful. Much as the verse-by-verse focus can be a good thing, it can lead to an anemic view of the fuller picture of God’s work, and a stunted understanding of the text. If we don’t understand how all the pieces fit together, we end up seeing the individual components as magical, talismanic phrases or sentences, rather than parts of a letter or a history. Not awesome. Preaching the larger passages helps us avoid this bad tendency.
• A major danger for teachers of Scripture: seeing the passage in terms of facts and connections and ideas and teaching points… without personal worship or repentance.
• Peter and the Sons of Zebedee left everything immediately. I wonder: what must their wives have thought?
• Genuine injustice is never replaced by anything but more injustice when tyrants are toppled by demagogues.
• Following C. S. Lewis in his introduction to Athanasius’ The Incarnation of the Word of God: Old books matter because they show us the world through other eyes. It’s like going on a foreign exchange trip… to another century, instead of another country.
• Poetry matters as a slower, more contemplative use of words that drives us to think and feel more carefully than reading prose.
• How do we build space for and prioritize communal acts of storytelling, poetry, music, and other artistic acts in the context of a decidedly non-communal culture?
• People in this day and age are desperate for community because we experience ongoing dislocation geographically and relationally: few of us live now where we grew up, and few of us have any meaningful, ongoing interactions with our neighbors.
• Video games and maturity: media are not value-neutral… but neither are old people!

There are lots more. For a while I made the discipline of trying to write down 10 ideas every morning. It’s something I should start doing again, along with regularly looking through the list — perhaps just before I head out for a long run would do nicely for getting my brain moving. Apart from that, it’s simply a matter of setting aside the necessary time to actually write, and then doing it without getting distracted by the many other things that can so easiliy occupy my time, many of them even very good things.

One of those good things is sleep, and I hear it calling my name. (Of course, because I’m scheduling this post, by the time you read it I’ll have had that sleep and a good deal more.)