Angie Peters

I think every one of us carries two things into a room like church. The first is an ache. It's a quiet, worn-out longing to be held. To stop striving for a minute. To hear that we're wanted, not because we finally got it right, but just because. The second is a gate. We don't always admit it, but we're attached to it. We like knowing who's in and who's out. We like the steadiness of rules and the safety of being the one who stands at the door. And sometimes the person we keep out is...

What happens when you take the platform away? For five days I fed a house full of people, 38 in total, and I made breakfast in my pajamas, with leftover makeup and messy hair. Where I live, I don't go upstairs without a shower and a face ready for the public. In that house I didn't give it a thought. The adults ranged from 19 to their seventies with 5 kids under four years old, and no one was trying to impress, and no one needed me to be something other than me. Nobody pulled on me. I could...

Every family has customs nobody remembers choosing. Every church has habits nobody remembers voting on. Every nation has stories it tells about itself that nobody remembers fact-checking. At some point, a practice stops being something a person does and starts being something a person is — and the moment that happens, questioning it stops feeling like curiosity and starts feeling like betrayal. That's the terrain of Mark 7. Is faithfulness measured by getting the details right? The scene...