I'm over in Europe teaching for the next two weeks for Torchbearers Missionary Fellowship. I'll be offering regular updates from Germany, Austria, and Prague, throughout the month. I hope you'll follow me, both here, and on Twitter, as I seek to uncover some lessons we can learn from Christians in Europe, both today and historically.

As we move into the advent season, I'm looking out the window of my room, located in southern Germany, on the shores of the Bodensee lake. I'm looking south, across the lake to the shores of Switzerland, only a few short miles away.  

I'm reading, "The Shame and the Sacrifice" while here in Germany, which is the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life, the German pastor who had the chance to remain in America as WWII was beginning, but elected instead to return to his homeland in order to walk with his own people through what he anticipated would be a dark and difficult time.There's a profound sense in which Bonhoeffer's return to Germany becomes a powerful and rich example of the very thing we celebrate at this time year:  "God with us."  

"There is a great different between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control and respectability. Fruitfulness, however comes from weakness and vulnerability.

A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another's wounds.

Let's remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness."

Henri Nouwen

It's snowing where I'm writing, at 8500' in a chalet in the Rockies. I'm watching it come down and land on the Pines and Firs that are just on the other side my window. The wind that's been howling relentlessly since I arrived Sunday night has finally stopped. I'm drinking a fresh pot of coffee, even though it's 3:30 in the afternoon, something I never do at home. There's a roaring fire in the massive stone fireplace, whose reflection I can see in the window. Snow, fire, coffee, trees.... "O taste and see that the Lord is good."

When the bottom was dropping out for David, there's this little phrase that shows up where we discover that he 'strengthened himself in the Lord'. What does that mean? How does that happen?

I suppose there are many ways, but what's most important is that we find a way to do it because God knows that the bottom drops out for all of us from time to time.

Recently, I’ve felt bursts of panic. The safe, mainstream Christianity of my childhood is starting to look more culturally dangerous than I ever believed. I think Jesus would be pleased.

First of all, somewhere during my lifetime, organized religion became a dirty word. It just sneaked up on me. I’m trying to figure out when it happened. Was it when Jim Bakker, the PT Barnum of Christian television, landed in jail? Did John Lennon get things rolling with his infinitely cool exploration of generic spirituality? Can I blame the academics for their relentless, decades-long attack on absolute truth?

And just like that—I realize that the guy who started dismantling organized religion in the first place was Jesus Christ.

I’m just as surprised as you are. And yet the way that Jesus overturned his uptight religious contemporaries is a world away from how self-proclaimed tolerant Americans are now dismissing the institutional church. We had better figure out the difference.