Amazing Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Baltimore, Maryland is the result of a consolidation of three historically white Lutheran congregations. Over the years leading up to the consolidation, each congregation had struggled as the neighborhood changed from a white working-class…
Read MoreBorrowing Inspiration: Pastoral Memoirs and the Narrative Imagination
The pastoral memoir allows us to overhear the sounds of the gospel reverberating through the life of another minister. It clarifies or challenges our own reckonings of ministry and provides clues to where in our lives God may be found,…
Read More“Intergenerational” as a Way of Seeing
One real dilemma of intergenerational worship is that it engages differing, and often competing, generational cohort values that live side by side in the congregation. People of different generations often like and enjoy being with one another. They may even…
Read MoreThe Problem Trap: A Narrative Therapy Approach to Escaping Our Limiting Stories
In my work as a congregational consultant, I have discovered that narrative therapy offers a number of lessons that can help church leaders navigate the change process in some distinctive ways beyond the push-pull dynamic that characterizes many congregational change…
Read MoreLiturgy and Life: Connecting Eucharistic Prayer to Parishioners' Stories
The first worship service in an Episcopal church I ever attended was at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron, Ohio. It was July 4, 1982. The hymns, lessons, sermon, and prayers tended to the special day by focusing on the…
Read MoreDiscipleship in Preaching: Connecting Our Story to God’s Story
Dr. Anthony Campolo, a teacher and preacher, was in the waiting room in a small airport in Haiti preparing to go back to the United States when a Haitian woman came up to him and said, “Take my baby!” He…
Read MoreDeeply Rooted in the Old, Old Story
Dne day last summer, as my small children were taking naps, I had the chance to lie upon a creaky bed in a summer cottage and spend some precious moments in quiet. Gazing out a nearby window, I looked up…
Read MoreComing Together: Healing Division and Forming Union through Story
The first Methodist Society was formed in the log cabin home of Wheeling, West Virginia’s founder, Ebenezer Zane, in 1786. That initial gathering of the faithful became the first organized church in the area and the first Methodist appointment west…
Read MoreCare-Full Listening: Ethnography as a Pastoral Practice
Most pastors are good listeners. They know how to open up a conversation and invite people to share the pain, struggles, and signs of growth in their lives. Many pastors stop there, and fail to help the members of the…
Read MoreSeeing Afresh: How One Woman's Work Became a Congregation's Ministry
At Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, we understand the power of story—so much so that we have set up intentional structures for discovering and bringing meaningful stories to the congregation. This structure consists of a group of three people…
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