Whether a Christian enjoys high church, low church, or something in between, aesthetics in the Church are not about any one individual person and their particular tastes. Aesthetics are, fundamentally, not a matter of legalism, but of edification—that the Gospel of Christ might be preached and taught to all peoples, unhindered by its medium.
Let us live by walking with Jesus, so that our Neo-Pagan neighbors, the witch, and frankly a lot of us Christians, can put down our crystals, our superstitions, our vision boards, and our bound sage in order to live out a liturgy of life, with rituals, practices, and behaviors that reflect who we are as followers of Christ.
As Jesus hung on the cross there would be no last second escape. No Greek goddess would swoop in to rescue him. He suffered alone. And yet even in that suffering he declared his victory on the spiritual battlefield to be your victory.

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How can we best talk about the Gospel with an Old Testament accent? Chad Bird provides us with a helpful "map" that highlights Egypt, the Red Sea, and Jerusalem. These three places represent the ways in which God graciously redeems, delivers, and sanctifies us. This brief essay was delivered at the 1517 Regional Conference in Bentonville, Arkansas, on April 17, 2021.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted written by Gretchen Ronnevik (1517 Publishing, 2021). Now available for preorder.
What kind of shepherd does God provide? The answer, of course, starts and ends with Christ.
The biblical shepherd leads his sheep. He provides for their needs. He protects them from enemies, and he does not leave his sheep unattended.
The result of this day’s proceedings, in Luther’s mind, was likely to be a painful death at the stake.
Jesus rejects what we believe is most necessary and instead points us to his pain, suffering, death, and self-sacrifice.
Jesus’s touch of this leper is the touchstone of the gospel itself. It’s a living parable of his entire ministry.
Jesus is proclaiming the good news that he has come to put an end to laboring to be loved by God.
The cross is not some mystic metaphor for the change we must undergo before our self-realization, but the earth-shattering event that changed the course of eternity.
We will always need comfort until the reign of God, his kingdom, comes in full with Christ’s return, and our suffering and the sin that causes it is no more.
You have this Shepherd who knows your voice, your cry, your incessant baaing.
Jesus offers to the anxious soul the one thing it ironically wants: certainty of the good.