Today I offer reason number fourteen of fifteen about why people choose not to attend a place of worship. I define a place of worship this way: a gathering of unrelated people where, for at least a couple of hours a week, they intentionally attend to the transformational development of their spiritual life. Excuse Number Fourteen: “The church didn’t help when I needed it.” I receive somewhere between three to six calls a week from people I do not know... Read more
One of the reasons I chose United Methodism as my place of service is the connectional system. I think such a system ultimately reflects more health and has more opportunity to be fully transformational than stand-alone isolated churches. Just as I don’t think there can be a spiritually healthy Christian who refuses to interact with other Christians, no matter how challenging that can be, I also don’t think that churches can be spiritually healthy when they choose to disconnect from... Read more
I see multiple parallels between the university faculty tenure package and the system of guaranteed appointments for itinerant clergy in The United Methodist Church. In both cases, the path to that place of security is long and tortuous. The supplicant must leap over tall buildings and navigate treacherous obstacle paths. He or she is subjected to multiple and often painful evaluations by groups of peers. At some point, certain scholars are deemed ready to be awarded tenure, and certain clergy... Read more
The buzz is everywhere for United Methodist Clergy: a commission has declared that the day of the guaranteed appointment is done. Here’s the report. There’s quite a bit of discussion about this on Facebook and I’m sure lots of other convesations as well. .The question: what is an “effective” clergyperson? How does someone decide who is and who isn’t “effective?” On first glance, this should be all that hard. Surely an effective clergy person is one who leads his/her church... Read more
Do I think everyone should worship God regularly, i.e., at least weekly, with a group of unrelated people who come together for this express purpose? Of course I do, just like my dental hygienist thinks everyone should floss every day and the local nutritionist thinks that everyone should eat healthy, not junk, food and the teacher of Russian literature thinks that everyone should read War and Peace, and the exercise guru thinks everyone should be walking 10,000 steps a day. Each... Read more
I was on my hands and knees under some playground equipment looking with some amusement at the neatly arranged line of small rocks set up underneath it. We were getting ready to put a heavy layer of high quality mulch onto the church play yard and I wanted to make sure everything was ready. Because of a drainage problem, we’d been delayed doing this, but once the french drain was dug and working properly, the time had come. What touched... Read more
Childhood has never been easy and parents always face complex tasks. For most of history, it was important for families to produce as many children as possible in order to have an adequate labor pool. Early years were rarely some sort of innocent time of play and joy, but were preparation to begin to work along adults as soon as possible. Children brought in the crops, cared for the animals, worked in sweatshops or did whatever else deemed necessary for... Read more
According to this article, found in the British Newspaper, The Telegraph.co.uk, extramarital sex causes earthquakes in Iran. I’m not kidding. Here’s the quote: Attractive women who snub traditional Islamic clothing to instead wear fashionable clothes and apply heavy make-up, caused youths in the country to “go astray” and have affairs, Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said. The hard-line cleric said as a result the country, bounded by several fault lines, experienced more “calamities” such as earthquakes, the reformist Aftab-e Yazd newspaper reported... Read more
Grounded–that’s been the word for many European passengers who had booked airline flights in the last week. As of right now, some of the flight restrictions have been lifted, but no one really knows what will happen in the next hour–or days. The last time this particular volcano in Iceland erupted, it kept spewing ash for eight months. Nature trumps all human plans. Shortly after all the flights were grounded last week, my oldest son, who lives in London, phoned.... Read more
I often wonder why on Easter morning the world can’t find peace. Of course, there are different calendars for dating Easter, so different traditions celebrate it on different days, but I don’t think it would be all that bad to have more than one day of real peace. But we don’t and we won’t because war is easier and habitual and it gives us an excuse to hide and cheat and deceive–both others and ourselves. As this particular Easter approaches,... Read more
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