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.

All Articles

Looking at our dining room table most days, you might think we were running a cartoon factory out of our house. Drawings. Everywhere.
One of my favorite shows in recent memory is the American law enforcement drama Law & Order.
The more I heard the song, the more I heard the heart of the Gospel in the song.
Today, people often bemoan the loss of children in the church.
But when God's Word of Law and Gospel are tuned up, when they're properly distinguished, then Jesus' words rain down on us like thunderbolts.
Last year, a friend I follow tweeted, “Calling yourself a sinner is spitting on all the work that Jesus did to make you a saint.”
Among the things that perturb me about modern Christianity is our residual clinging to a sort of “Christian-karma.”
God coming to us at Christmas encapsulates the essence of Christian faith: we don't make ourselves strong and then work our way up to a strong God.
If the devil took over a church, I suspect it would be bursting at the seams every Sunday, with smiling faces, clean noses, straight morals, conservative voting, institutional fidelity
It’s time to call bull on a theology the dominates Christianity.
When we explain away God’s Word, we jettison the reality of our ominous diagnosis in the “Thou shall/shall nots” of the law, and with it the sweet cure in the, “This is My body/blood” of the Gospel.
We treat the Scriptures as if they’re our literary property to toy with as we please.