Heartlands

/

Tumblr

/

Linkedin

Category: Ministry

  • Rural Soul: Confession – Guest Blogger Sara Keeling

    ​ The Rev. Sara Porter Keeling continues as guest host this week, while I am in Israel & Palestine.  Today: a confessional look at the journey of call. I started a blog in 2003. Blogging—was THE social media platform of its time—we were a few years away from facebook, twitter was still confusing, and instagram →

  • Can We Talk About Sexuality?

    “In every family there are subjects that seem to bring out the worst in us when we discuss them.  For United Methodists, that topic is currently homosexuality.” (9)  So says Jill Johnson, one of my co-authors of the new book, Living Faithfully: Human Sexuality and The United Methodist Church, just out from Abingdon Press.  But this →

  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Social Justice

    Any list of contested phrases in American Christianity today is going to include “social justice.”  It’s not just that talking about social justice makes folks uncomfortable.  The prophets were doing that all the way back to Amos and before, pointing out when Israel failed to hear the cry of the needy, failed to protect the →

  • Five Things I Learned from a Cowboy (Church)

    I love a horse trough baptism as much as the next guy, but I have to admit that I’m a traditionalist at heart.  I appreciate the time-worn beauty of prayers passed down through generations, the mystery and splendor of a good four-part choir, the movement and purposeful flow of a well-planned order of worship, and →

  • What Goes Without Saying – Some Thoughts on Charlottesville

    Let me begin with the ‘ought to’s.  It ought to go without saying that what happened in Charlottesville at a gathering of white supremacists and white nationalists was an ugly display of our divisions in this current moment. It ought to go without saying that an ideology that believes the white race is superior to →

  • Attention Must Be Paid: Writing Young People Into My Life

    How do you write about the activities of people who don’t act in ways you can see?  I’m spending this month in West Texas writing a novel that has, as a main character, a 16-year-old boy.  Of all the characters in the book, this was supposed to be the easy one, since he’s loosely based →

  • Never Call Retreat?

    I’m going on renewal leave.  What does that even mean?  I’ve spent the last six months trying to get my mind around it, preparing for it, and anticipating it with a strange mixture of joy and dread.  I do believe, because I’ve seen how it has helped others, that renewal leaves can refresh us for →

  • Nunc Dimittis: Words for a Church Closing

    What’s the import of a church closing?  We struggled with that question last Sunday at Berea United Methodist Church as we held its final worship service.  I offered some words for this country church that has been at the center of a small Virginia town, New Church, for 132 years…   When I was young, →

  • We’ve Got an Open Door Problem

    I’ve always been a little worried about our open doors.  When the United Methodist Church adopted the slogan “Open hearts, open minds, open doors,” some twenty years ago, it captured a sentiment that many United Methodists have about themselves.  Whatever else we may be, (and that’s an area of great contention), we have been the →

  • It’s a Howlin’ Shame

    Crawling under the skin of the present age is a reality, an anthropology so old that it infests everything we do.  I felt it as I read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s sociology of Tea Party Louisiana in Strangers in the Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.  But it’s there in liberal moral →