"15 Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ." (Eph. 4:15 NIV)
This is, barring something newsworthy to someone other than myself, our last installment from this blog's series I've loosely titled "Reflections from the Water Tower". We'll go on to other things next week.
But if you've been following this blog you'll know much of this came out of the controversy surrounding a group known as the Freedom From Religion Foundation asking, by which I mean petulant demanding, that the town of Wilmore Kentucky remove the lighted cross from its water tower. The details of this have been chronicled in earlier blogs, so I'd encourage you to go back and reared hose if you want further information. I will say this. As a rule of thumb anytime an organization has
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You can tack on another three as I worked on my doctorate at Asbury. That lighted cross became a symbol of faith, of home and a beacon to be with cherished friends.
But more than anything else, it's gotten me to think about the image of light in the Scriptures. After all Jesus calls us to be the light of the world. Truthfully Jesus doesn't give us any options. He says we are the light of the world. In other words there is no other light. It's either us as the church, or nothing.
When we think of ourselves as the light of the world we usually look to all the pleasant aspects of light. It's warm. It shows us the way, it protects us. It keeps us safe. All of which it true. The difficulty we find in the church is that this is not all that light is. And if we only pattern our faith after the pleasant side of being light we either lose our effectiveness or we are in for a rude surprise when the world reacts poorly to our being the