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.
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.
Mark DeVries in “Family Based Youth Ministry” says theres a crisis in the relationship between adults and teenagers–that teenagers are isolated and left to fend for themselves, and that is a crisis solely of our generation. Is that reflected in the popular literature for young people?
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…)
Below is a quote from Simone de Beauvoir on the characteristics of “the girl” or “the adolescent”. Much of this chapter resonated with me. Other parts of it were intriguingly different, or coming from a place which I observed as old. But I think this section may speak to both the experience Read more…
Thomas wants to go back to normal. Like us, he is exhausted by the emotional mess that was his last week: Thomas’ world was one of monotonous powerlessness, poverty and violence, and Jesus’ message of peace and hope thoroughly changed who he was and how he lived in that world.
This is the sermon that I preached on March 3, the Third Sunday of Lent in Year C, on the tree that doesn’t bear fruit and the burning bush.
What’s your theological anthropology? Who/what are we as human beings, things with bodies? Good, bad, some mixture of both?
I am partial to the explanation of what God is as given by 1 John. It is simple and it is powerful: God is love. This means that those who love are those who participate in God, those who are conduits for God’s activity, and those who, as John writes, Read 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
In which Maggie shares her very first composition for the Prayers of the People.
A friend and I were watching Battlestar Galactica the other night, and we were watching a particularly heavy episode. It’s in the second season, when another battle ship finds the Galactica and makes significant changes to the chain of command–and the attitude of the fleet. The new leader is a Read more…
Throughout this quarter, I kept running up against a wall when I thought about the theology that we studied for our Introduction to Theology course. As I mentioned previously, we studied one author (Paul Tillich) and his systematic theology, which was very complicated, enriching, but also thoroughly academic and often Read more…
In which Maggie explains the books that “Introduced” her to the New Testament.
The Literary Bible and the search for the Historical Israelite people in three books for my Introduction to Hebrew Bible Course
A Lecture by Father John Chryssavgis, a deacon in the Orthodox church, and the theological adviser to the Patriarch on environmental issues.