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Category: Ministry

  • Why We Should Continue Treating the Pandemic as a Crisis (and an Opportunity)

    With the reappearance of so many familiar faces following the Great Unmasking of the vaccinated, there’s a great temptation for people in the church to breathe a sigh of relief and try to pick up where we left off in March 2020. Kay Kotan has other ideas. “Reality check: Life will never be the same,” →

  • Putting Colossians in the Mix

    Reading Colossians Remixed:Subverting the Empire by Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat, published in 2004, is a reminder of a time when postmodernity was in its ascendency. It’s not clear where we live now, but less than two decades later you feel that we are somewhere very different than the environment Walsh and Keesmaat →

  • Overhearing Women’s Prayer

    The pioneering Christian feminist theologian Letty Russell once described a litmus test for theological statements. With my books packed away for an upcoming move, I won’t be able to track it down, but it went something like this: Any interpretation or statement about God that does not affirm the full humanity of women cannot be →

  • The Women Beyond Wesley

    This review by Alex Joyner was published on the great Englewood Review of Books site and is republished here with permission. Even today, if you visit the website for Cokesbury, United Methodism’s venerable bookseller, you’ll see an image that has shaped Methodist perceptions of their heritage. It’s a circuit riding preacher on horseback reading a →

  • Standing at the Threshold of a Post-Pandemic Church

    Here’s a bit of trivia for you: In ancient Roman construction, there was often a stone placed at the threshold of a door that one would have to traverse in order to enter or exit a building. That stone was called a limen. I tell you that because the word lies behind this year’s trendiest →

  • Rediscovering the Enchanted World

    Allow me some magic. Some dark, mammalian creature moves swiftly across the field outside my window at middle distance between the treeline and me. It traces a smooth, straight line across my field of vision, just far enough away in the early dawn light to be indistinct. Could Maxwell, the neighbor cat, be that far →

  • How to Build Your Online Church Campus

    If you’re a leader in a typical church struggling with the challenges of pandemic and shrinking resources, you may pick up Nona Jones’s new book in hope and set it down halfway through in despair. The first half of her title From Social Media to Social Ministry:A Guide to Digital Discipleship catches the eye of →

  • The Bible and the News: A FaithLink Retrospective

    We always thought we were ahead of the times, but the times caught up with us. Two weeks ago we got the news that FaithLink was no more. I may have been the longest-serving writer still in the stable. Twenty years ago, when I began writing for this curriculum piece “connecting faith and life as →

  • The Politics of Accountability

    FaithLink, the faith and currents event curriculum of the United Methodist Publishing House, just published its final issue. I’ll have more reflections on the loss of this venerable resource in a later post, but here’s a link to the essay from that last issue, which was picked up by Ministry Matters. After 20-some years writing →

  • Returning to Dakota

    “As when I was a child, I want to remain in the open, becoming something other than human under the sky. (178)” –Kathleen Norris, Dakota Returning to Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography almost three decades after it was written, I tried to decide what made it so powerful for me when I was a →