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 […]
It begins with the blowflies, as good a symbol as any for what happens to rural areas when the weather turns stagnant, hot, and deadly. They know the smell of death and where to find it. So it’s an ominous sign when these end-time harbingers descend upon a small farm in the Australian bush outside […]
“I look around my church and all I see are ghosts.” It was time for a pastoral change and I was meeting with the Pastor-Parish Relations Committee in my role as the District Superintendent, preparing the church and myself as we looked toward the appointment of a new pastor. The woman speaking was a longtime […]
In the first part of my interview with Winn Collier, pastor of All Souls Charlottesville and author of Love Big. Be Well.: Letters to a Small-Town Church, we talked about his decision to set his novel in a small town. We also talked about the use of letters as a way to tell the story […]
Winn Collier’s new book, Love Big. Be Well: Letters to a Small-Town Church, is a generous celebration of the potential of church. In my review I noted that it is a gentle, human love story between a pastor and his congregation told in the form of letters written to the church over the course of […]
When Amy Quitman writes a letter to the unknown pastor that the Pastoral Search Committee hopes to call to their Presbyterian church in the small town of Granby, she includes an invitation that would set the hearts of potential candidates like me aflutter: We want theology, but we want the kind that will pierce our […]
You could hardly imagine two more different artists than the ones you meet in the opening pages of Katherine James’s debut novel, Can You See Anything Now? [Paraclete, 2017]. There’s Margie, who paints vivid canvases, attributing personal characteristics to still lifes, sketching nudes, and doing a grand scale work featuring ovens that make her daughter […]
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 […]
Heartlands 