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…

It is my birthday this week. And in that vein, I look to the immortal words of the rapper 50-cent (at least the ones that I can quote here): “Go shawty, it’s your birthday. We gon’ party like it’s your birthday. We gon’ sip Bacardi like it’s your birthday . . . “. 50-cent’s song…

You’ll notice something different about this Newsletter. You’ll notice that there is a little link below that says “Read More”. If you click that link, you’ll get the rest of this newsletter article. If you’re not interested in the newsletter article, then you can just move on to the rest of the information in the…

“Get into the Word?” he asked questioningly, “How small would you have to be?!?” That is one of the many incredulous responses that I remember getting back from some seemingly harmless “Christianese”. When I say, “Let’s get into the Word,” you, dear reader, probably understand that I’m trying to say “Let us read and meditate…

Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, which means that we’re in the beginning of the season of Lent. Lent is perhaps one of the oldest liturgical seasons that we have in the Church (with the exception of the celebrations of Epiphany). Lent began as a time of contemplation for a group called the “catechumenate”. These “catechumens”…

Why Jesus? This question will function as the theme for the Lutheran Student Fellowship – Region 12 Spring Retreat. They were silly enough to ask me to present and lead them through a process of answering this question for themselves. The question “Why Jesus?” makes me immediately think, “Why any God or gods?” Why is…

Three frogs sat on a log. One frog decided to jump off. How many frogs were left? I heard this story problem at the Emergent Leadership training that I went to last week. The answer, counterintuitively, is “3”. Three frogs were left on the log because “deciding to” do something and doing something are different.…