As a journalist, I thought I had learned what I needed to know about the Five Ws and the H — Who, What, When, Where, Why and How — the essential building blocks of writing a story. A conversation with…
Your church’s purpose is not to make you happy
Your church’s purpose is not to make you happy. Your church’s purpose is to help you become like Jesus. Expect the former and live disappointed. Expect the latter and live with deep satisfaction and significance. This conversation has happened enough…
Rick Warren’s conundrum: What’s the nature and extent of salvation?
What if more of us believed in and trusted in a more loving, gracious, inclusive God? What if more of us focused on this life rather than the afterlife and understood salvation in terms of healing, wholeness, reconciliation and liberation from the life diminishing forces that possess us and oppress us, so that we are free to truly love God and love others?
Pushing people to purpose
When Gil Rendle speaks, I listen. He’s been a pastor, author and consultant. Now retired, his work has inspired me and given voice to much of what I see and feel is happening in congregations. He “gets it”, in a…
Fording the stream, mid-career
Over the next nine months, we will take a big-picture look at the trajectories that shape and reflect our North American lives. We will consider “the future” of things as ordinary as the relationship we have with animals and consumer…
Vision is a movement of God that is memorable
How do you define vision? If you cannot define it, you may not know what it is when you have it. Vision is not the same as mission. The eternal mission of a congregation is the timeless understanding of the…
Matter matters
If Christmas means anything, it is that matter — the stuff of flesh and protons and quarks and quasars — matters. It matters to God. He became it. It amazes me how often I heard language that spiritualizes Christianity more…
There is purpose
There’s an argument going on. Sometimes you have to listen closely, but it’s rumbling beneath the polite noise of our sophisticated society like the background radiation of the Big Bang, filling every black hole as it sweeps across an infinite…