Her last name was several feet tall. Spelled out in chipped bold letters that had seen more hurricane winds than fresh coats of paint. Colored red as if Jesus had spoken them. WOMBLE the sign read above the hardware store….
No one ever talks about how hard it is to come back from sabbatical
“You should go on sabbatical more often,” said Marijane on her way out of church last Sunday. She noticed what others had too. I was preaching with more energy, like back when I was first called to Northside six years…
Your idea of goodness may not be kindness
Many years ago, two deacons from a church I served as pastor asked if they could take me to lunch. Was this an act of kindness? An act of thanks for my hard work? There’s always a reason for lunch….
The church faces a three-dimensional decision
Three cultural-biblical issues intertwine today to hold the Christian church in knots of conflict. Part of that conflict concerns whether the three cords are cut from the same cloth or not. These strands are race, gender and sexuality. From a…
Searching for Grace: First Sunday
This is the second of a five-part fictional story set in the early 1990s about Paul Graham and his congregation, Grace United Church of Christ. In Part 1, Paul made the difficult but necessary decision to leave the Southern Baptist…
‘Grandmas make the best banana bread’
With the morning sun wrapping rays around the two windows in the bedroom, causing a pale light to creep steadily in from their edges, my oldest child rustles the bedsheets. It’s like she can feel the idea of warmth, the…
Three fatal flaws of the Christian faith
Christianity, as we have always known it, is in trouble. I’m not just referring to declining church attendance and survey numbers that suggest fewer and fewer people are interested. Although the spiritual need within humans remains strong, people are looking…
Do you play church in a pretend world or serve people in the real world?
There is the world the church acts like we all live in, and then there’s the world real people live in. These are not the same places. It has taken more than a year of deconstructing my own experiences as…
The church is called to die
The church my wife and I have served since 2000 was founded 70 years ago as a Southern Baptist mission, a church plant in a neighborhood that had just been converted from a dairy farm. The founding pastor understood his…