I’ve known churches that have been on the frontlines of every concern of justice, congregations in which you could well assume nearly everyone is voting for the same candidate at the top of the ticket, churches in which no controversial…
I left the pastorate while still loving it
Leaving the pastorate of my congregation in June was the hardest vocational decision I’ve yet had to make. After reading Alexander Lang’s recent article, “Departure: Why I Left the Church,” I wanted to write about leaving my church while still…
Here’s something to try on for size: Talk about things that are ‘more-than-human’
In our world of ecological precarity, I’ve been exploring what it would mean to move beyond doing environmental justice, to living in a different relationship with beings beyond the human. I think about this relationship both with those beings we…
‘Will it come like this, the moment of my death?’ Living and dying in a COVID-19 world
This global pandemic requires us to confront the possibility of death – not fearfully or obsessively, but with intentionality born of the reality of the present moment, longing for Easter as Gethsemane and Golgotha linger.
CBF & LGBTQ Baptists: Thanks for the Illumination
Illumination makes things clearer for those willing to look where the light is shining. And these are a few lessons I’ve learned from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Illumination Project.
More evidence religion is declining — and that’s OK with these pastors
A computer scientist who crunched the numbers on American religion says the decline of faith will accelerate during the next 20 years. But is decreasing religiosity and increasing secularization such a bad thing? Some clergy don’t think so.
Joining the resistance: A 100-day counter-agenda for the Church
The Christian movement has never been in a cozy relationship with empire and remained a healthy and vital movement. Rightly spoken, “Jesus is Lord” is always a statement of subversion to the empire’s rule. And there are no easy or…
Trump inspiring more churches to enter sanctuary movement
In the mid-1980s, members and leaders of Old Cambridge Baptist Church risked fines and imprisonment to provide sanctuary to an El Salvadoran wanted by her government and U.S. immigration authorities. Now, Pastor Cody Sanders says, a group of church members…
Believing what we’ve preached, post-election
For the past two weeks, I’ve crafted my sermons in light of the election that was coming. I engaged the themes raised by the lectionary texts of the day to deal with the difficulty of an election season that put…