Come to the Eastern Shore of Virginia two centuries ago and more and you would have found Methodist preachers traveling their circuits in pairs. It was the normal way in the early days of our denomination. Going solo was the exception. The first American Methodists formed their clergy by sending them straight to ministry with […]
The wonderfully-named Rebekah Simon-Peter looks around at mainline Protestantism, including The United Methodist Church of which she is a part, and sees some problems. It’s not just that the church is competing for attention in a post-Christian world with Sunday morning soccer practices. It’s not even the eight maladies she lists that include shrinking numbers, […]
Children, it seems to me, are blessedly free from the notion that we are earth-bound. On my recent teaching trip to Burundi, I had the chance to worship in a United Methodist Church in the hills outside the capital city. Rev. Jean Ntahoturi was showing me a school that was under construction, designed to serve […]
With all the talk of division and separation in our church and society, it’s heartening to know that there are places where United Methodists are coming together. Next Friday I’m getting on a plane for my first trip to Africa. I got the call about 6 weeks ago when the Burundi United Methodist Church announced […]
What if the problem with the name of the Commission on A Way Forward was that it had one too many words? Pick the one you’d like to delete, but my vote is for ‘Forward.’ ‘Forward’ carries a lot of weight in this title. It implies several things. First, that we are stuck in an […]
Previous segments of my interview with Dr. Ashley Boggan Dreff, author of Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality, covered the history of the incompatibility language in the United Methodist Church and the ways that the trends in American politics and culture have affected the development of the denomination. In this segment, we […]
In the first segment of my interview with Dr. Ashley Boggan Dreff, author of Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality, we discussed the origin of United Methodist language around homosexuality at one of the first General Conferences of the new United Methodist Church in 1972. (We also talked about George Whitefield’s knuckle, […]
I talked to Dr. Ashley Boggan Dreff two days after the St. Louis General Conference ended. As the Director of United Methodist Studies at Hood Seminary and author of Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality, she made a great conversation partner for trying to put what had just happened in some perspective. […]
Some of the advice that Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell and Jason Byassee have for clergy is very straightforward. “If you’re really tired and wondering whether you should work more or go to bed, don’t wonder—just go to bed!” (157) Excellent tip. Back from my nap now, I’ll go on to say that other advice in Faithful […]
It took two weeks of explaining before I broke down trying to get through one more rundown of what happened in St. Louis.* Of course, I felt the pain of it even while I was at the General Conference. The Tuesday night it ended I stayed up late writing notes to former seminary classmates and […]
