Any garden-variety atheist, agnostic, or even religiously indifferent materialist knows that if—and we do mean if—the church is to survive well into the future in the northern hemisphere it won’t be through a linear extension of today’s church. Every index…
Read MoreMaking God More Accessible
The television commercials were disturbing: Traditional-looking churches barring or physically ejecting racial and ethnic minorities, gay couples—and people with disabilities. One tag line was “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” The national campaign, which aired several years ago,…
Read MoreSpiritual Formation and Money: Mission, Ministries, and Generosity
For many religious people, their faith and their money live in an uneasy truce with each other. Seldom are we encouraged to see our attitudes about—and actions done with—our money as essential aspects of our spiritual formation as believers. Our…
Read MoreThe Stories We Are
We think of ourselves in the form of an unfolding story. When we want to recover something from the past, we rewind the film that is our life to see the narrative there. When we think of the present, we…
Read MoreDeveloping the Capacity to Attach Anew
No one likes to grieve. But amid loss, change that generates loss, and broken or breaking attachments, we feel the powerful grip of grief. And it hurts. At such times, leaders are challenged to help congregations grieve, so that they…
Read MoreAmerican Dissonance
I remember reading sociologist Peter Berger’s 1969 book A Rumor of Angels at a time when many academics in a range of disciplines were preaching the soon demise of religion. The academic heirs of social theorists from Karl Marx to…
Read More“Funeral Evangelism”
The first significant crack came right out of seminary when I was appointed by the bishop to serve a three-point circuit in the Appalachian communities of north central Pennsylvania. The logging industry—once booming in these now impoverished communities—had been completely…
Read More"Funeral Evangelism"
The first significant crack came right out of seminary when I was appointed by the bishop to serve a three-point circuit in the Appalachian communities of north central Pennsylvania. The logging industry—once booming in these now impoverished communities—had been completely…
Read MoreTeaching the Tradition
Christian discipleship began with vocation, with the “call” of Jesus to some fishermen. Jesus’s call was a call to relationship: “Come, follow me.” Whether among first-generation Jewish followers of the Way, third-generation Gentile Christians in Asia Minor, or twenty-first-century Western…
Read MoreControlling Conflicts of Interest
The new pastor of a small church was concerned that the music director was also the church treasurer and that two married couples sat on the church council. He worried that there might be a conflict of interest, but not…
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