We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord. We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord. And we pray that our unity will one day be restored. And they’ll know we are…
How to celebrate Pentecost without balloons, plastic doves or salsa
A few years ago, on Pentecost Sunday, I noticed red and orange balloons streaming upward from the church altar. The service bulletin explained these were meant to symbolize the infamous tongues of fire at the first Pentecost. After the service…
Scripture changed his mind on women in ministry, Rick Warren tells Russell Moore
The Great Commission is one of several scriptural reasons Rick Warren believes women are called by God to leadership in the church, he told Russell Moore in a March 8 podcast. Warren, recently retired pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern…
The Holy Spirit: An advocate, comforter and encourager for times like these
The Holy Spirit can be the most underrated and misunderstood persona with the Divine Presence. Popular author Frances Chan suggests, “There is a big gap between what we read in Scripture about the Holy Spirit and how most believers and…
How to prepare for Pentecost
I’m lying on an ice pack early this morning, doing my back exercises and listening to Pray as You Go, a tool for meditation, with monastery bells, music and a Bible reading. It warms up my cranky body — and…
Pentecost and the (Un)Holy Land
On the evening of July 16, 2017, I boarded an 11-hour flight to Tel Aviv, Israel. It was my first trip to what has been known for years as the Holy Land, as part of a clergy contingent sponsored by…
Could the righteous, riotous fire of Pentecost be burning in the protests for racial justice?
The riotous fire of a burning police precinct might not be the Pentecostal flame many of us expected, and that itself is a failure of white Christians to listen to the suffering around us.
‘We can’t breathe’: an apt Pentecost prayer for white Christians
Now more than ever, we need that Breath in our bodies, that fire in our bones, that vision of an otherwise possibility that bespeaks sheer revolution and not a measured tinkering with a supposedly “broken system.”
The time is now: Born-again Christians need to make some babies
The Holy Spirit is conceiving new life and needs a partner. The Church, the body of Christ, is called to be born again and again and again. May we be a body in the infancy of innovative growth, a body vulnerable and yet powerful as the Church enters an unknown future full of new possibilities.