I am back from a lovely and restful vacation in the Great Smoky Mountains. Restful except for the final morning, when a massive adult male black bear sauntered over between our cabin and car just as we were set to leave. Ignoring our yells and claps, he just kept slowly moving toward us, forcing us and our final bits of luggage back into the house.
As you can deduce, I lived to tell the tale. Though I tell that tale with a smile, at the time it was truly frightening. Bear attacks are rare, but those statistics are cold comfort when I’m staring down the face of a wild and hungry beast. Suffice it to say that themes of mortality have been on my mind lately. And so some of our new content at CC this week is timely: a reflection from Debie Thomas about the (prematurely called) death of the church itself, and a poem from Jeanne Murray Walker about the mathematical elusiveness of resurrection.
“The question is not whether the church is dying; it’s whether the church will have the courage and humility to become once again what God has always called it to be: a seed that willingly falls into the ground and dies so that new life can nourish the world.”
