Extra weight can keep the Body of Christ from living out fully the love of God. As frustrating and difficult as this time of quarantine has been, churches have been given the opportunity to shed the weight of excess programs, ministries and activities.
When this pandemic subsides, may compassion continue
In the wake of COVID-19, let us never discount the cumulative impact of compassion. Small acts of concern and sensitivity can bring about transformational healing in people’s lives and promote societal wholeness.
Amid this pandemic, can we say with Julian of Norwich, ‘All shall be well’?
More than six centuries later, Julian of Norwich still speaks to modern Christians caught, like her, in the clutches of another “Great Pestilence.”
It’s time for innovative partnerships between churches and for-profit businesses
The 21st-century, post-pandemic church should not eschew participation in the American economy because of who it might leave out. Instead, it should embrace a new role as a transformative social and cultural guide for doing business in a way that is ethical, sustainable and missional.
Cyborg discipleship: boundary-crossing through COVID-19 and beyond
While we wait to gather again physically, we can ask: How are we experiencing the Spirit’s movement in our cyberspaces of worship, inviting us to cross boundaries between human, machine, more-than-human, the physical and the non-physical?
Amid isolation and silence forced by a pandemic, ‘We’re all monks now’
Even if shelter-in-place for you feels like being held in solitary confinement, this devastating pandemic WILL end. Until then, perhaps you have been given a rare opportunity to quiet your heart and mind for a greater purpose.
I’m a music minister who nearly died from COVID-19. Here’s what I’m called to do now
I have become a patient advocate and personal resource for people around the country whose loved ones and friends are now behind the COVID curtain, alone. With reluctance, I have also entered the public dialogue about COVID-19 on social media.
I’ll get to hope. For now, I need to sit in the ashes and mourn
This pandemic is not a theological crisis. It’s a moral one. We would do well in this moment to take the prophet Jeremiah’s advice to “put on sackcloth, lament and howl.” We need to mourn and rage and contemplate what led us to this moment.
The sacrament of not touching: a gift of grace made literally a matter of life and death
As congregational separation and virtual worship persist, I find myself longing for the healing touches consistently dispensed in our home congregation – sacraments of grace I’ve taken all-too-for-granted.
Self-care as political resistance – or how (not) to sacrifice humans to ‘save’ the economy
In the face of economic collapse, Americans are being invited to become sacrificially collectivist in their willingness to strap life, limb and vulnerable loved ones to the altar of our hyperventilating economy for the good of “everyone.”
Confronting all who would abuse the sacred idea of liberation in a time of crisis
Liberation is a sacred idea. Those who exploit the crisis of a global pandemic for their own political purposes or personal gain are not liberators.
We need to get our theology straight: It was not God’s intent that Jesus die
In incarnational theology Jesus reveals to us the very nature and heart of God – so the cross cannot be Jesus’ payment, saving us from God. There can be no distinction between the work of Jesus and the work of God, the nature of Jesus and the nature of God.