Welcome to The Light.
Matt Chandler has spent nearly twenty-five years watching the same congregation age, grieve, and stumble — and what he's learned is that spiritual growth resists our hunger for systems. It is slower than we want, messier than we admit, and perhaps more honest for it.
That honesty is harder to hold in institutions. In Vestavia Hills, Alabama, the senior pastor of Shades Mountain Baptist Church — a congregation of nearly seventy-eight hundred souls — announced his resignation abruptly this week, calling the decision heartbreaking and asking his people simply to pray. What remains unsaid in moments like these often carries more weight than what is spoken.
And then there is the question of what we owe one another across the distance of wealth. New York's proposed pied-à-terre tax — a surcharge on second homes valued above five million dollars — has stirred the familiar argument about whether the very rich can ever truly be reached by civic obligation. Perhaps the more interesting question is not whether they can escape it, but what it means that we keep asking.
That's this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
