By Jenny Pope Most churches greet the rush of the back-to-school season with special worship services and promotion Sundays, but one Houston church stays grounded with an annual project that has now helped protect the feet of more than 100,000…
Clergy discouragement and satisfaction: part two
In my last post, I covered five factors that contribute to clergy discouragement. Now I want to turn to the other side of the story: clergy satisfaction. I believe six habits fuel legitimate clergy satisfaction. Worship the God we preach,…
Public policy and the heart of God
For the past 15 years, I have directed a faith-based non-profit called Friends of Justice. It all started in Tulia, Texas when a massive drug bust in the summer of 1999 inspired an article in the local paper about human…
Grieving summer: a Havdalah
For many people, summer is a type of Sabbath: a slower pace; vacation; more interaction with neighbors as the warm weather invites people outside; a deliberate pause between academic years. Even people whose lives do not operate solely on an…
On accepting a call to pastor
I am literally speechless. I have accepted the call to be the interim pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Fellowship in Lexington, S.C. I am speechless because even on this blog, I have expressed my doubts about being able to find a…
Funding the formation of the called
Robert Dilday’s article on the educational indebtedness of the church’s future ministers published last Friday by Associated Baptist Press, along with the Auburn Center for the Study of Theological Education paper “The Gathering Storm: The Educational Debt of Theological Students”…
Clergy discouragement and satisfaction: part one
Recently, I’ve read a number of posts on various sites dealing with the topics of clergy discouragement and satisfaction. For what it may prove worth, I’ll add my observations to the conversation. Let’s start with discouragement. Based on my own…
Sis, Tata or Mum Nell
They call me “Tata.” That is what many francophone people call their aunts. I am not their aunt, however. They are Senegalese after all, and I am American. However, we would all say that race, nationality, language nor culture changes…
spare your face the razor
*Author’s Note: For maximum poignancy, please listen to The Oh Hello’s The Truth is a Cave repeatedly whilst reading. You’ll thank me later. A few mornings ago, as I stood staring groggily into the poorly complected face stubbornly greeting me each…
Now that we have eliminated evangelism, let’s work on eliminating evangelical
In some moderate to progressive denominations it is all about the “E” word. Either these denominations vilify certain “E” words and seek to eliminate them from the proactive movement of the denomination, or they are embrace more deeply certain “E”…
Welcoming the visitor: “what credit is that to you?”
A young woman described her experience of moving to a new community and finding a new church home. She wrote of how the church made an inspiring first impression on her: Everybody was super-accommodating, bending over backward to lend a hand….
American folk religion
When I was in college, I had the privilege of spending a couple of weeks in Mexico, on a mission trip, as a member of something called a “youth choir”. A couple of pre-emptive answers to your inevitable questions: Yes, our shirts always matched….