It’s 1973, and I’m in my small-town high-school history class. My teacher asks, “How many of you are Protestant?” About a third of the students raise their hands, and the teacher exclaims, “Wow, that many of you are Catholic!” Jump…

The story is told of a night long ago when the stars began to fall from the sky. The villagers, surprised by the stars streaking across the sky, panicked and assumed the world was coming to an end. They ran…

In 2002, the Lilly Endowment awarded me a grant to study the role of Christian practices in relation to congregational vitality. My team speculated that a new intentionality around practices such as hospitality, prayer, healing, discernment, and justice would foster…

The first position I took as a solo pastor was in a suburban, pastoral-sized congregation with two Sunday services and a combined attendance of one-hundred-forty people. The parish had always had male senior pastors until the female interim, who was…

During the Great Depression, my grandfather lost his job and started a new company. His friends had enjoyed his Christmas gifts of homemade candied fruit–the kind used in fruitcakes–and encouraged him to turn what had been a hobby into a…

I recently traveled to a charming clapboard church in the middle of an East Coast city to visit with an interim minister nearing the end of a two-year term. “These are good people,” this gifted pastor and preacher told me,…

There are plenty of Christians who feel theologically and spiritually displaced. They feel lost in the middle between the noisy extremes of religion and politics and long to feel at home right where they are. They sense that it is…

For Christopher Wendell, the first beatitude–“blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”–is about a third way of seeing poverty and wealth: instead of ignoring the divisions that wealth and poverty create or being paralyzed…

Over the years I have heard countless painful stories about how people new to a congregation couldn’t get through the “gates” of the church–those implicit codes and requirements that those of us “inside” the church unwittingly embody and construct as…