This morning, our church choir shared some of the great hymns of the faith with our church in a cantata style celebration of music. Instead of our traditional Easter cantata, we picked some of our favorite hymns, our fearless leader researched their stories, and we presented a morning of lessons, messages and songs. And tears…
Living Redeemed
personal struggles with Christian living
A Different Kind of Proof
A man named Bob Ebeling thought he was a loser. Mr. Ebeling was an engineer on the Challenger Space Shuttle and discovered that the O-ring seals in the rocket might not hold up in the cold temperatures of the 1986 launch. He and fellow engineers pleaded with NASA to stop the launch, but they decided…
Momentum for Life: Vision for Immanuel
God spoke: Write this! Write what you see! Write it out in big block letters so it can be read on the run! And when God gives a vision aids our momentum. It paints a picture of the future that drives us forward because we can’t wait to get there. God’s vision aches for…
Blogging as a form of Public Theology
I just spent the last couple of days in Washington, D.C. exploring what it means to be a public theologian. Over the last year, I have been part of the Lewis Center’s Community Leadership Fellows Program. We have gathered for three day sessions together at Wesley’s downtown campus in order to reflect upon the role…
Face-to-Face
There is a struggle and a tension I have with facebook. If I am going to be honest, it is one of my primary sources of news. It’s a place I get information and get informed and pass along the world to others. And so sometimes, I use it as a vehicle for naming realities…
Reproducing in the Church #NaBloPoMo
I was sitting at a conference with some friends and the speaker kept lifting up the decline in membership of the United Methodist Church. One of the reasons cited was United Methodists were having less children than we used to. And the four of us all stole a glance at one another. The speaker was…
Untitled
When I was in high school, my youth group went on an international mission trip to Peru. Forty youth plus chaperones set out from Cedar Rapids determined to make a difference in the lives of other people. We even made t-shirts. I remember the night that we came up with the slogan for the back…
truth and reconciliation
I read a post earlier today that dives into the words Bree Newsome said as she was arrested this weekend: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? What I loved about the author’s wrestling is that she…