Recently I had an opportunity to be a part of something that felt like the beginning of a bad joke – a Baptist, a Lutheran, a Presbyterian, a Roman Catholic, and a non-traditional denomination guy walk into a cathedral . . . We were meeting in order to talk about our theologies and were they…

Have you ever watched a balloon let go of by the hand of a little child? Have you watched it climb higher and higher and higher into the air, until it was just a small little red speck in the sky carried away by the wind? Have you wondered how far it went? Have you…

This week there are very few students on campus, and Mary is off at the Youth and Family Ministry Association retreat, and so I took a little time to lengthen my usual walk around campus and the neighborhood surrounding our church location. I try to do these little walks every week to some extent, and…

I just got back from seeing Jimmy Buffett at Jazz Fest 2015, so I’ll open up this newsletter with a line from a favorite Jimmy Buffett song, “I’ve got a bartender ear, a beachcomber style, piratical nerve, and a vaudevillian style . . .” (Schoolboy Heart). It’s that “piratical nerve” line that reminds me so…

Ask anyone who studies communication and they will tell you that “non-verbal communication” is important. One theorist (Albert Mehrabian) thinks that non verbals comprise up to 93% of the component parts of all personally communicated messages. Hand gestures and tone of voice are key, as well as facial expression and body posture. Similarly, in the…

This Sunday we celebrated our newest members, Larry and Julie. And it might have brought up a question for you, what does “membership” mean? The reason that churches have “members” comes from Paul’s equation of “people in the church” with “members of the body of Christ”. You can find Paul writing about this in I…

This past Sunday, I repeated the term “Choose Life” a bunch of times because it fit with where I was going with the sermon for Easter – that we make choices about what we reject as “unlife” so that we can have a more pure experience of “Life-life”. But when it comes to our choices,…

“I find God on my motorcycle,” is what he said to me in response to my question about how he interacted with God after telling me that he was a “very spiritual person.” I sort of wondered how fast he thought God was running away from him that he needed to catch up to the…

Recently I have been a part of a series of opportunities to talk about different beliefs as they apply to different religions and different denominations within Christianity. This seems to always be a topic that interests people. We like to know what our Roman Catholic or Baptist brothers and sisters think when it comes to…

This is an important question that all too often we neglect to answer for our neighbors around us. How is your experience of Jesus and His Church somehow valuable to you? Our culture (both in its secular and parochial manifestations) has done a phenomenal job of denigrating the word “religion” to mean something that has…