I first became a licensed local pastor in July 2010. Over the course of the past decade, I have tried a whole lot of things as a pastor, and very few of them turned out the way that I planned or hoped. Thus you could say it’s been a decade of failures. I don’t intend that to be negative or self-pitying. Sometimes I actually made mistakes which taught me specific lessons; most often the circumstances and decisions of other people... Read more
My buddy Jason Micheli recently wrote about the gap between the Christianities of conservative evangelical journalist David French and Episcopalian presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. He was quoting an article in which French was trying to explain the difference between his evangelical faith and Buttigieg’s mainline faith. The main point of distinction French saw was in their understanding of salvation. French quotes Buttigieg in a Rolling Stones interview saying, “My faith teaches me that salvation has to do with how I... Read more
We live in an age in which actual conservative principles have been buried by tribal political discourse. There is such a thing as a valid and valuable conservatism that exists apart from things like patriarchy, white nationalism, and social Darwinist capitalism. There is a way of thinking that insists on prioritizing values like integrity, honor, and discipline rather than thinking the end always justifies the means and it’s okay to fudge the numbers if your intentions are good. True conservative... Read more
As United Methodism approaches our denominational apocalypse at the May 2020 General Conference, I’ve come across a lot of hand-wringing about our theological identity, namely that we don’t have a clear identity and that’s the whole problem. I understand the angst; Methodism for the next several months will continue to be the largest remaining Protestant mainline denomination that hasn’t split between conservatives and progressives. But this past February, I went on a lay-led Cursillo retreat with a mostly conservative crowd... Read more
My therapist told me something last week that blew my mind. The Hebrew word rafa that gets translated as “Be still” in the famous Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God,” can also be translated to mean “Let it fall.” Those two phrases are so utterly different in their connotation. For a neurotic like me, “Be still” is the one thing that’s almost impossible for me to do, so it always feels shaming to hear it. But... Read more
A recent drama in Christian Twitter (several news cycles ago) involved the circulation of a ghastly-looking tweet put out by Calvinist pastor John Piper’s Desiring God website. It seems to expose the hideousness of the Calvinist God whose mandatory “joy” that he’s “serious about” is like the forced applause of a North Korean standing ovation for dear leader Kim Jong Un. And yet… having some sense of the intent of the theological point, I can shockingly almost get behind it... Read more
One of the most uncomfortable and least talked about parables of Jesus is his parable of the wineskins. Jesus says that new wine cannot be poured into old wineskins without bursting them; it requires new wineskins. The implications of this parable for the continuity of apostolic tradition are highly problematic. Which is why they are usually qualified, explained away, and bracketed. Otherwise Jesus’ parable might be held guilty of Marcionism, the heresy that says Christianity must throw away the old... Read more
I’m not the best person at parsing through details. Right now I’m in the thick of a new school year in a campus ministry building that is still a disaster after a summer flood and I’m hiring dozens of new student workers, so my mind is swirling with all that. I have noticed a lot of commentary about two proposals for what needs to happen in United Methodism’s future: a UMC Next proposal that is being championed by centrists and... Read more
For those of you who weren’t following progressive Christian twitter a few days ago, there was a flareup that has come to be called #ResurrectionGate. I’m not going to try to adjudicate who started it, who was at fault, etc. There was bad behavior; there was misrepresentation of other people’s statements; there were overreactions; it was complicated. I’m more interested in offering some reflections on progressive Christian discourse and whether/how Christian orthodoxy matters. I haven’t been able to organize my... Read more
This past Friday, on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that inaugurated the gay liberation movement, the Evangelical Covenant Church did something they had never done in their history: voting to expel a congregation from their denomination. They did so because the members of this congregation, First Covenant Church of Minneapolis (FCCM) had declared themselves to be fully inclusive of LGBTQ people and a staff-person who wasn’t the pastor had presided at a same-sex wedding off-site in 2014. The... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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