Jesus was talking to his disciples and he said this. “You’ve observed how….rulers throw their weight around and how quickly a little power goes to their heads. It’s not going to be that way with you.” Matthew 20:25, The Message.
Jesus’ statement came directly after one of his disciples asked for appointment to a seat of power for her sons in what she thought the Kingdom was going to be. Sound familiar? Continue reading Leading versus “lording”
Laetitia Thompson, age 17 was one of the two hundred 16-20 year-olds present for the MTV “Enough is Enough” town hall meeting in Washington, D.C. Held on April 19, 1994, the meeting was supposed to explore the issue of violence in America with, then president, Bill Clinton.
Questions ranged from teen suicide to handgun legislation and showed the depth of angst being experienced among Gen Xers.
Then Laetitia raised her hand. “Mr. President, boxers or briefs?”
It was an iconic moment. A teen-aged girl was asking the President of the United States what kind of underwear he wore and simultaneously showing how far we had tumbled on the civility scale. Continue reading Boxers or Briefs
The little town of Laguna, New Mexico sits on the north side of I-40, midway between Albuquerque and the Arizona line. A church sits at the top of a hillock, surrounded by adobe houses all resembling the red dirt on which they sit.
If you blink or look too long at your dashboard you’ll miss this wisp of a town. More like a village, there’s no polluting industry or neon lights to blind the stars. It’s monochrome, except for the white church sitting at its summit. On this day Pepsi trucks lined the lined the tight little streets. They were there to film a new soft drink commercial and looked totally out-of-place. Continue reading Pottery Sold Here
On an early Sunday morning in 1999 we went down into the Paris subway to begin the next leg of our trip – Normandy and the D-Day beaches.
Since it was very early in the morning there weren’t many people in the subway, and it caught our attention when we heard American voices?
“Where are you from,” we asked them.
“We’re from Las Vegas; what about you?” Continue reading Conversation in Paris
Remember the AD 2000 scare about the effect of the new millennium on computers all over the world? Y2K was the name of the scare, and it drove doomsday-ers to their local stores to stock up on supplies for a world catastrophe in the computer realm. Frantic questions circulated about whether planes would drop from the sky and electrical power would fail on January 1, 2000.
In point of fact, there were only a few problems. Among the small problems reported were the failure of two bus ticket-validation machines in Australia and 150 slot machines in Delaware’s race tracks. Continue reading Y2K
William Willimon, Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, once told a group of pastors about the outrage of a parishioner when a gallows, complete with noose, popped up on the front lawn of the Duke Chapel. The Wilmington Morning Star reported that the gallows was part of the set of a movie being filmed on the iconic lawn.
According to the parishioner, a gallows had no place in front of a nice church. Indeed, the gallows stood for violence and death – not the sort of thing that polite church-goers would want to see walking into the narthex. Continue reading Gallows On a Church Lawn
Sonia Singh is a mother and artist from Tasmania, off the southeastern tip of Australia. Sonia is also an artist that rescues second-hand Bratz dolls. She calls her new creations “Tree Change Dolls” because of the radically different look she gives the formerly sexualized dolls. Continue reading Knitting A New Innocence
I am a church planter working with a nascent church that targets Millennials and folks who have given up on church. Most of my pastoral life has been spent (over 40 years) in pretty traditional churches that failed in their calling to be outposts rather than fortresses. My last 10-15 years have been occupied with reading books relating to the matter of how to go about being the church in this age. Some of them have been critiques of the church such as unChristian by Kinnaman and Lyons. This book results from research done among Millennials and their assessment of churches today, particularly Evangelicals.
Two statistics are startling to me and have caused me to want to think more and more deeply about what church should look like in this part of the 21st century. In the 2010 census it was found that 20% of respondents selected “none” in answer to the question, “What is your religious preference?” “None” has never been that high in previous censuses. Additionally researchers have begun looking at another group never watched called the “Dones.” This group has not left God. On the contrary, they are full of faith. But they are “done” with church. The fact that this group is new and growing is proof that we need to put our “pay attention” hats on.
A friend of mine called me at my office and warned, “Arthur has just left my office, and he is mad. He’s coming to your office. You’d be well advised to leave.”
Arthur was our church’s resident crazy man. He was unemployable, quirky, and creepy. His long suffering wife put up with his craziness to the great amazement of all of us who knew them.
I hurriedly left my office and drove toward my home where I was going to put my car, out of sight, into the garage. But in my rearview mirror appeared Arthur, clearly following me home. I took a longer route and eventually lost him. Several minutes later the door bell rang. Continue reading Come Out of Him
Our canoe trip began from our outfitter’s camp near Ely, Minnesota. A canoe, two fishing poles, and three backpacks sat on the boat dock, along with our waterproof map. After my son and I gave our canoe a test spin, we put the packs into the canoe and slipped off into the BWCA. Our map had a disclaimer in the lower right corner, ‘Not for navigation purposes.”
That’s not a very comforting realization – “not for navigation purposes” – because the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is millions of acres of pristine wilderness. It is only trees and water as far as the eye can see, and there are no convenient road signs to direct you. Portages from one body of water to another are often obscured or hidden by the distant tree line, and we could only steer to approximately where we thought the path would be.
Continue reading In the Wilderness
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