Churches need websites if they want to be welcoming to potential visitors, says Lynne Baab, a lecturer in pastoral theology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and author of Reaching Out in a Networked World: Expressing Your…

On a cold, winter Sunday morning, I entered my church study following worship and was startled to hear the door slam shut behind me. The woman facing me as I turned was an influential church leader. Her face burned as…

I recently finished a pastoral search process that has left me with questions about how we, as the church, go about communicating with one another in this age of technology. Last spring I agreed to be considered as a candidate…

During the more than twenty-five years that I served as either a director of family, youth, and young adult ministries or as an adult youth minister, I had a birds-eye view of the cultural shifts influencing parishes and congregations. Since…

At the board meeting where Gower Street United Church recently voted on the issue of same-gender marriages, members of the board made a clear recommendation: let’s share what we have learned with the wider church. There was a general belief…

In the Jewish faith, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are meant to be days of weighty confrontation with the issues they embody (especially issues of morality and mortality), as implied in their Hebrew appellation Yamim Noraim, the “Days of Awe.”…

Faith communities are no stranger to difficult times. They know how to help people through death, despair, lack of food and other material resources, and many other dire straits. But usually there are only a few people in a church…