A hard-bitten boss paces around a circle of workers in his sales force. “I got a phone call this morning from one of our oldest customers,” he says. “He fired us. After 20 years, he fired us. Said he didn’t know us anymore.” The scene is from a United Airlines commercial from almost 30 years […]
The following review was originally published on The Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. The author is Heartlands editor, Alex Joyner. What if questions of human sexuality are not something that the United Methodist Church (UMC), like other mainline Protestant denominations, have to settle and get past, but rather are the foundation on which the […]
Warning: United Methodist inside baseball ahead. One of the strongest selling points for the One Church Plan, (and one that I’ve made), is that it takes off the table the contentious, divisive debate over LGBTQ inclusion and allows us to focus on making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world—the stated mission […]
One of my great unfinished reading projects is The Works of John Wesley. A long row of books from the series lines one of my shelves these days holding the collected works of the principal founder of Methodism including sermons, journal entries, and minutes of the first conferences. This week I received Volume 32: Medical […]
Loneliness is a bear. No one wants to feel unsupported, unheard, or unloved. You would think, in a world of so many new ways to connect, that loneliness would not be a problem. But Instagram, it turns out, is no answer to the human condition. Churches—especially churches in rural communities—often experience their own kind […]
I was standing in a cemetery near Onancock, sweating in the mid-July heat, when Chuck Reece asked me how I got from radio journalism into ministry. I was supposed to be interviewing him, but Chuck Reece, even over the phone, is a master at sniffing out stories and he trained his curiosity on me before […]
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. —Isaiah 43:2 As I write this, it looks like the Eastern Shore will be spared the worst of Hurricane Florence, (or Flo, as I’ve come to call her this week). I’m praying for the people […]
Church trials don’t create community; they create tribes. And that’s got me concerned for The United Methodist Church. Some 640 United Methodists recently lodged a formal complaint against the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions, who is a United Methodist with membership in a Mobile, Alabama church. Though it is almost so rare […]
John Wesley has been claimed by so many different heirs and used to so many and varied ends that it is refreshing to have someone like Hal Knight come along and point us back to the source. John Wesley: Optimist of Grace, his new entry in the Cascade Companions series designed for nonspecialist readers, comes […]
The preacher was in trouble. It’s hard to take the life out of the story of Jonah, but somehow he had. Struggling preachers are not unusual. We’ve all had a Sunday. Or several. But in early 19th-century Methodism, including the AME branch of Methodism, (of which this preacher was a part), the official preachers had […]
