Eye to eye across a restaurant table laden with plates of oysters and wine goblets brimming with fine German Riesling, a young candidate for ministry and the more experienced clergyman who had nominated him for a first pastorate met to…

It was a little over a year ago that my good friend Martin Copenhaver, a United Church of Christ pastor in Massachusetts, shared with me the remarkably low number of ordained clergy in his denomination under the age of 35:…

A woman sitting next to me in the pew stood up and said with feeling: “I don’t want just to believe in God; I want to know God.” In this heartfelt exclamation during the sermon feedback time at St. Mark’s…

“Your people…are the shoot that I planted, the work of my hands, so that I may be glorified.” (Isa. 60:21) “They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do…

Temple Aleph, founded by 12 families five years ago, has grown to 67 families. At the annual meeting there were two candidates for president: one was a “founding” member and the other was a “new” member who spoke of change…

Something quite amazing is happening in our day: a culture of religious practice is collapsing. In the Catholic tradition, that collapse has seen a diminution of the obligation that propelled many a Catholic to church on Sunday. In the Protestant…

Those of us with invested interests in congregations—because we work in or for them or because we have invested so much of our time, money, sweat, and hope in them—live with an often unstated or unexamined assumption: of course congregations…