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Two Big Reasons for Churches to Talk About Race
These are dangerous days to talk about race. If you try to raise the subject in polite company you’re likely to face some averted glances or rolling eyes. In impolite company, well, who knows? For some, talk of race is a pretext for a political agenda. For others, the failure to talk about race is… →
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Your Civil War Is Too Easy: Looking for The Thin Light of Freedom with Ed Ayers
Who starts a story of the Civil War in the middle? By the time Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia marched up the Shenandoah Valley into Pennsylvania in July of 1863, the war had been going for more than two years. The twin Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg on the 4th of July usually mark… →
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6 Steps to a Growing Church. Yes, Even Here! – Part 2
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… →
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6 Steps to a Growing Church. Yes, Even Here!: Guest Blogger Ben Rigsby
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… →
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The Country We Live In: Race, Sin, and the Birthday of the UMC
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… →
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Sitting Beneath the Michigan Tree: Back at the Festival of Faith & Writing
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… →
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Chicken Houses and Change
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… →
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Absence Makes the Heart: A Jerusalem Reflection
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… →
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And yet…: Good Friday poetry
Yes, there’s a day for suffering, for marking love’s dark mien. Contorted faces bearing the cost of contingency and time. There’s no reason to the grief, there’s no cause for any tear. Even the call to Private Ryan–Earn this!– can’t elevate the squalor of our deaths. We all end in ridiculous deformations of our former… →
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Heartlands 