This is an excerpt from the introduction of Stretched: A Study for Lent and the Entire Christian Life by Christopher Richmann (1517 Publishing, 2026).
We can bring our troubles, griefs, sorrows, and sins to Jesus, who meets us smack dab in the middle of our messy mob.
Confession isn’t a detour in the liturgy. It’s the doorway.

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He is significant, not as a founder of his own movement, but for setting the procrustean bed of the particularly American church with its dogmatizing yet broad ecumenical stances.
If I don't preach Christ, then there's really no reason anyone should roll out of bed on Sunday to hear anything I have to say.
Infamy allows us the opportunity to hone one of our favorite skills: to shrink a 343-page life story down to a single paragraph that narrates what happened on one day, at a certain hour, and in a certain location. We can whittle an entire biography down to a single Tweet.
Around Easter my mind often drifts back to all of the annual ‘Revival Services’ I attended when I was growing up. Every year they began the revival with the Easter service.
Being a member of a church connects people to the whole reason the church has for existing: that we might obtain justifying faith in Jesus Christ through Word and Sacrament.
Pelagianism is the ancient heresy that says that if you work hard enough and will something strongly enough, you can prevent sin
If I’m going to join your church, there’s some things I’ll need to know first. I need to know whether you practice a Christianity that’s primarily a to-do list.
I am the Resurrection,’ says Jesus, not an abstract miracle or idea
With these words, Jesus at the same time acknowledges that earthly government is both divinely sanctioned and, at the same time, not to be conflated with the kingdom of God.
All this disciplined living is to be done in freedom.
As one substance, Christ is God become man, the fullness of God who was pleased to dwell in Jesus Christ.
The majority of churches still use the traditional eight-sided font. The question I’d like to explore in this post is, “Why?”