In Part One of Ben Rigsby’s post on reviving a church in a small town he talked about life-changing worship and reaching new people. In this post he discusses 4 more steps to growing a rural church… It takes critical mass to launch a church, it takes the same to revive This is a tough […]
Anybody who’s spent more than a minute with me since last summer has heard me yammer on about the people l met in Archer City, Texas on my leave. One of those folks is the dynamic pastor of First UMC, the Rev. Ben RIgsby. You don’t often find church planters on the rural frontier but […]
Behind every discussion in American life is the question of race. At this stage in our history, with the long shadows cast by slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the struggle for civil rights, and last year’s gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville, the impact of race is not something we can ignore if we want to […]
Kwame Alexander, Newberry Award-winning author of The Crossover, looked out across the sea of 2,000 introverts and defied every tenet of writerly reserve. “Say ‘yes,’” he said. Say ‘yes’ to the opportunity, the challenge, even to the indignities of selling your work. There is power in your words. Kwame has a bus now with a […]
The old saw that says rural churches have a hard time with change may be getting tired. All you have to do is look around those churches to see that a lot of things are already changing. Maybe the question isn’t whether we will change, but how. It seems like every other day now I […]
On Easter Sunday…some thoughts from my first visit to Jerusalem in 2011… I would say that the world is a hopeless place…except it’s not. Somewhere around here – at the Garden Tomb, under a church – there’s an empty tomb to prove it. It’s what we have to offer this place – emptiness. Absence. If […]
Heartlands 