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Why the Duke Divinity School Controversy Matters
Isn’t this just another academic squabble full of sound and fury but signifying not very much? The recent controversy at Duke Divinity School regarding a faculty training, (the details of which were helpfully outlined by Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Ed), could be seen as just one more piece of evidence that the Great Divide →
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How Bad Memory is Afflicting Your Ministry (& Maybe Your Marriage)
Could your church (or community) be suffering from faulty memory? I thought about this last Monday when I attended a presentation on the Missional Wisdom Movement. The movement is relatively new and it is supporting the creation of new forms of Christian community that take the form of everything from a laundromat ministry to co-working →
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The Last Thing I Want to Talk About – Bishop Oliveto and the UMC
The last thing I want to talk about is the United Methodist Church’s legal wrangling around the election of Bishop Karen Oliveto, who came to her office last year as a lesbian pastor in a same-sex marriage. Last week the Judicial Council of the denomination ruled that her consecration as bishop was carried out in →
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Five Reasons to Look Forward to Ministry in 2017
Tired of counting the reasons the sky is falling? Me, too. The traditional metrics for mainline ministry (church membership, finances, number of organists) may be on the decline and the angst about how the nation’s Great Divide will impact the church continues. But let me give voice to the hope that is within me during →
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How to Be Here (and Not There)
“It is strange to be here,” John O’Donohue says in the opening line of his book, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. For O’Donohue, that meant attending to the mystery of the particular human life and acknowledging that each of is “the one and only threshold of an inner world.” It is strange to be →
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Attention was paid: The strange & sensual movement of Holy Week
Last night they didn’t try to package Jesus into a digestible savior. In the Good Friday service I attended, the space was prepared. Attention was paid. The movements were purposeful. Light and darkness played across the sanctuary. There was little attempt at explanation and what there was was superfluous. The story was told well. Music →
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Rural Soul – guest blogger: Sara Porter Keeling
Sara Porter Keeling can tell you about many things, but today she goes Across the Street to shed light on how community is built in a small town. Sara is the pastor of three United Methodist Churches in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. She’s also got some truly excellent preacher boots: This is →
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Can we see a little less clearly, Lord? – Prayers for a Way Forward
WITH my glasses off the thing I think I know becomes indistinct and fresh. A deer’s tail becomes a great white feather. A distant tree, a man by the roadside hailing me. When I run without my lenses the world slips out of bounds and newness emerges like angels in our midst. Since we →
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Your Giddy Desire — Prayers for a Way Forward
HOW good and pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to dwell together in unity! So the psalmist says and we believe it could be so, though our glimpses of such goodness and pleasantness are scant and near mythical. Yet we long to live together – to see as you see and love as you →
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Unity not excepted – Week of Prayer for A Way Forward continues
UNITY is a derivative of what we want. What we want is wholeness, health, salvation. What we want is to be able to unfold in your presence to let shadows fall out into light. What we want is to be seen and known. What we want is the source and end of our wanting. Then →
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Heartlands 