Now, more than ever, I will keep my faith. In uncertain times, and wading into uncertain waters, I will listen more than ever for how I am to be a Christian. I will not forget that the Jesus Movement was originally counter-cultural, originally a movement of resistance against a tyrannical Read more…
Palm Sunday doesn’t feel good, to stand outside your building, looking around to see who in your neighborhood is watching you. It doesn’t feel right, to do ‘churchy’ things in a public place–where the ancient rituals we take for granted are visible for anyone to judge. And if we forget how to have that feeling, we forget how to be truly critical of our faith.
Jesus calls us to shock ourselves and wonder–who could I never imagine as my neighbor?
Youth Directors, we need to talk seriously about Christianity & Islam. We need to model respect, honest inquiry, and most importantly, an informed understanding of the basic beliefs of God’s many children. In all this mess, we need to give them a foundation to stand on.
You are their faith leader, and it’s your job to talk to them about faith–especially, now, other faiths.
How many times have you started a conversation by saying “I’m Christian, but I’m not…crazy/fundamentalist/mean/convinced that there is a war on Christmas”? It is always really icky-feeling, isn’t it?
As progressive Christians, we have GOT to get rid of this precursor to all that we are. By speaking like this, we are only reinforcing that normative Christianity IS crazy/fundamentalist/mean/convinced that there is a war on Christmas–that we are the outliers.
So, here are some ways that we can describe who we are that don’t begin with “But I’m not…” (more…)
So I’m confused here–why do the disciples think this is so impossible? Why do they equate being rich with being able to enter the kingdom of God in the first place? Many of the disciples weren’t rich by any means.
I want to caution people against this idea that we should be spending all of our time outside of the church. We still need the kind of community that people would actually want to participate in. We still need to focus on who we are, how we live out the gospel, so that we can be the kind of community that is worth inviting others into.
It’s because you don’t know how.
Last weekend I was at a workshop for church leaders, and it focused on mission and evangelism. The leader of the workshop asked the question:
“My God, who art in the kingdom of Heaven, which is within. I wish you would tell me your name, the real one, I mean. But ‘you’ will do as well as anything. I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get Read more…
To ask for forgiveness does two things: it reminds us that ultimately we can still press on, and it reminds us that our failures aren’t going to break God. God won’t break because there’s a typo in your bulletin. God won’t break because your Profoundly-Important-and-Somehow-Totally-Useless Committee is mean, obstinate and unwelcoming. God won’t break because of your church’s hypocrisy. Nothing in this world can break God–not even crucifixion.
First and foremost, to be authentic we must always be a people who point towards resurrection for all people in the love of God. We don’t always have to say it quite like that, but we do need to live it just like that. Everything we do points to that fact: that God’s love transforms our deaths and turns them into new life.
I have never noticed or perceived that people were not interested in God anymore. People are incredibly hungry for God. It isn’t that people don’t want to experience God. It is that The Establishment Church of the 1950s is failing to be a place where that happens.
Last week, I posted a version of an article that I wrote for the Hamline Church newsletter in December. The topic was being a Godbearer in Advent, on pausing to make room to be an incarnation of God in our daily lives. This idea is inspired by The Godbearing Life, by youth ministry extraordinaire Kenda Creasy Dean.
Now, though, as I think more about it, and as we approach the third week of Advent, there’s more to be said.
Being a Godbearer is making space for God to enter into the world through us. Now more so than ever, I think, with the rage and outcry over the grand jury decisions in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases, we are called to make space for a new thing to happen in us.
Because I work with young people, I have the privilege of never taking anything for granted—even church. I work with people at that stage of life when they are just figuring out who they are and who they want to become, and nothing is sacrosanct when you’re trying to figure out the world.
This Sunday was Palm Sunday, and in liturgical church traditions, it’s one of the weirder ones. It’s heavy with emotion, full of the ups and downs of a nonsensical, wild faith.
We start outside the church building, singing an ancient hymn and waving branches around like our ancient stories tell us the people of Jerusalem did. The whole congregation stood out in a city park–this morning being the first warm morning in God knows how long, here in Chicago. The air was humid and smelled like rain, but the wind was hot to us and dusty. (more…)
In which Maggie muses about what a church congregation actually is, especially in relationship to pastoral care needs…
Musings on the imagining of pastors, who they are, how they care, and what role the romantic rural models have for us seminarians