Growing up, I had always heard, and quite honestly believed, that the opposite of fear was love.  But as the years have gone on, as I have gone to Divinity school, read the Bible a little more closely, I have begun to see that there are lots of opposites of fear. As a matter of fact, in some ways, the entire season of Advent is themed with opposites of fear.  Hope, love, peace and joy are all opposites of fear.... Read more

Today we celebrate the abundance found in God’s Creation. Thanks be to God. As we move forward may we work diligently to share that abundance equitably as a form of true thanks giving. PEACE! Read more

Good and gracious God, Today, like the rest of the world, when I woke I wrapped myself in myths. They are comfortable and warming in what can seem like such a cold world. Yes, they are old and worn but they are familiar and even the most fashion forward find comfort in this thread-worn garb. They tell me that while it may not be fair that 1600 children die from hunger everyday, I can do nothing about it. They silence... Read more

A Personal Response To The Myth of Redemptive Violence “Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world. It has been accorded the status of a religion, demanding from its devotees an absolute obedience to death.” – Walter Wink Inevitably humans end up at war with each other. It seems to be entrenched in our very beings at times. Over the course of history, peace seems to be a difficult place for humanity to... Read more

Children Grow Where I Send Thee A church is a surprisingly difficult thing to just pick up and move. I’m not just talking about the physical building. If you’ve ever tried to get a entire group of people to move (be it spiritually, ideologically, or theologically), you wold probably agree that, at times, it might just be easier to move the physical church – but we can’t. Churches must grow where they are planted. Digging them up with all of... Read more

Can The Walls Come a Tumbling Down? As we’ve seen, the society and community in which most churches sit have moved forward with the inevitable changes of life and for decades as they have changed The Church has done everything in it’s power to remain firmly in its place. The net result is that the Church has not only removed itself from its former place of centrality in most communities, but it has become decidedly ‘other’ – an alien in... Read more

Sit Boy, Sit. Good Dogma. In order to understand why we need to grow our churches organicly (whatever that may mean – don’t worry, we will get to that), we need to understand a little about how we, The Church, arrived at our current location as well as what the location is. There was a time, frequently referred to as “the good ol’ days,” when the church was the center of society (as in the first quadrant of the illustration below). A... Read more

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” – Mahatma Gandhi “This is my body, broken for you.” – Jesus In 2009:43.6 million people in the US were in poverty. That’s 14%. In the richest nation in the world.  15.5 million  children were in poverty.  In 2008:49.1 million people in the US lived in food insecure household (hunger was a daily threat for them).  Homes with children reported... Read more

Hopey-Changey Churches are dying at an alarming rate. Research by The Barna Group suggests that 3500 to 4000 churches close every year. More than 2,765,000 people leave the church each year.  And yet we, the Church, insist on doing the same thing over and over again and somehow expecting different results. When confronted with change we insist that “it has always been done that way,” as if history is an acceptable excuse for continuing down our path to demise. In... Read more