Doug Mawer and I, good friends and co-partners in ministry, have been “tentmaking†in ministry now for quite a while. (Tentmaking is a term adopted from St. Paul, who made tents while he served churches, at least for a time. See Acts 18:3). We co-pastor the same church for a half-time salary, and we make up the other half with other income. Mainly because the church can’t afford to pay both of us full time, and we had decided to... Read more
This is a good quote from William Placher, “Helping Theology Matter: A Challenge For the Mainline” in The Christian Century, October 28, 1998: “So many of our churches have become boring and depressing places. So many of the brightest children of our church members are going to Buddhist retreats or reading about Celestine prophecies or God knows what. They aren’t seeing churches as places where they migth go to think seriously about their religious questions.” I appreciate The Christian Century‘s... Read more
I watched the foreign film Caché (Hidden), directed by Michael Haneke. If you like the ordinary Hollywood fare with clear plot, non-stop action, “no thought required”, then you’d better stay away. Like the title says, much about this movie is hidden. When the credits started rolling at the end, I exclaimed to Lisa, “What?!”, although I caught something just before that shed light on the underlying theme of the movie. Sony Classics summarizes: “Georges (Auteuil), a television talk show host,... Read more
I want to tell you a story about this painting. A woman who has previously purchased my art on eBay emailed me recently asking about a painting I had on eBay called “Separated Friends“. She wanted it, but it had already sold. We made an arrangement for me to paint a similar one on commission. The painting above is the finished product, called “Separated Sonâ€. Here’s why I named it that. She told me why she wanted it. I quote:... Read more
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This may be my last comment on Jack Good’s book, The Dishonest Church. In it, he quotes at length from a book I had to rigorously study during my seminary days, Fowler’s book Stages of Faith. Fowler’s conjunctive stage is the final stage: “In the transition to the Conjunctive stage one begins to make peace with the tension arising from the realization that truth must be approached from a number of different directions and angles of vision. Faith must learn... Read more
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