Cultivating Shalom

The Sunday church service as antidote to spiritual amnesia.

I am very much enjoying Jared Wilson’s new book, The Storied Life. I commend it to you if you do writing of any kind.

An excerpt that struck me as I was reading last night, and then experienced this morning with my church family —

What we experience in our churches is a recovery of our memory of The Story. We walk in each Sunday, as we wake up each morning, with a kind of gospel amnesia.

Rehearsing together the great works of God, central to us through the person and work of Jesus Christ, recenters us, restabilizes, renews us. In a way, the church service exists to re-evangelize the people of God and remind them of the power of the gospel against sin and the condemnation of the law as well as the sheer moral confusion and chaos of the world.

The story of the liturgy helps us subdue the competing stories the world tells us, the competing stories the enemy tells us.

In this way, thinking of Christian writing as informed and guided by The Story is our own way of subduing the earth, building civilization, and cultivating shalom.

(emphasis and paragraphing mine)