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The week before last, Pastor Heather and I were strongly encouraged to attend the School of Leadership, a gathering of clergy from Wisconsin and Northern Illinois at Green Lake Conference Center in Wisconsin. More than 250 of us gathered for a few days of conversation around a deceptively simple question: How might we innovate for love? In other words, how might the church find new ways to share God’s love in the particular communities where God has planted us? One of our exercises was to identify a need we see in our community, imagine a ministry response, and then workshop the idea with other clergy.Read More →

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There are two practical, but important things I want you to know as we head into the week ahead. First, I’m still on my quest to get all of us around Christ’s table. This has probably been a ten-year quest for me. Communion is one of those places where we don’t just talk about being the church. We practice it. Young and old, longtime members and first-time visitors, people with deep faith and people still figuring out what they believe. We come to one table because Jesus invites us there. Over the last year, we’ve been experimenting with how we better include our children inRead More →

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Depending on how long you have been around The United Methodist Church, the words Social Principles may mean very different things to you. Some of you know them well. Our Spirited Women, for example, studied a previous version together in 2020. Some of you may remember conversations about our Social Principles from Sunday school classes, Annual Conference, or debates within the denomination. And for others, my recent preaching may be the first time you have heard the words at all. So, before we get much farther into our year of commUNITY: Living God’s Dream Together, I thought it might be worth answering a pretty basicRead More →

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I’m breaking one of the rules. For nearly twenty years, the Rev. Dr. Gennifer Brooks, my preaching professor, has lived rent-free in my head. Those of us who took some of Dr. Brooks’s earliest preaching classes share this experience. I wouldn’t call it a support group. But maybe it is. Dr. Brooks had rules for preaching. Lots of rules and I still follow most of them. They have served me remarkably well. One was this: Let the sermon go. After preaching on Sunday, reflect for a little while. Learn from what worked or what didn’t. Then kick your feet up, watch a game or takeRead More →

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Last week, Pastor Rob wrote from retreat about one thread Pastor Heather and he kept hearing in our summer survey: a longing not to navigate faith, change, and the challenges of our world alone. That was only one part of what you told us, but it points toward something larger. Across the survey, we heard a congregation asking questions about belonging and difference, care for creation and care for one another, prayer and spiritual life, our United Methodist identity, the changing world around us, and what faithful Christian living looks like in the midst of it all. Underneath many of those questions is one weRead More →

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For the past few weeks, we’ve spent a lot of time with Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and their friends—and even more importantly, with Jesus’ words in John 15. Be Loved. Be Kind. Be You. Be Brave. When Pastor Heather and I first answered the call to build a worship series around Toy Story, one of our hopes was simply to find a creative, intergenerational way into the good news of Jesus. But along the way, I’ve realized there is another benefit to a series like this: it gives parents, grandparents, and all the adults who love children a language for carrying these conversations home. Because asRead More →

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By the time you read this, I should be driving somewhere in western Kansas, probably wondering why I didn’t fly to Colorado Springs. Every year about hour six of the drive, that question occurs to me. But by the time I get farther west, I remember why I drive. The two-day trip has become something of a labyrinth for me: a long, slow way of unwinding, laying down some of the burdens I’ve been carrying, and deciding which ones God might actually be asking me to pick back up. My destination is a little 500-square-foot, off-the-grid cabin in the Wet mountains of Colorado that I’mRead More →

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I think it was about three years ago that large language models like ChatGPT entered the mainstream conversation. Mostly for fun, I asked one AI model to write a church blog about Lent. What came back was…fine. At its best, it was a middle-school one-page paper on Lent. It knew what Lent was. It could string together some inspiring thoughts. It sounded vaguely churchy. But it didn’t really say anything about what Lent meant for us. I remember thinking, “Well, this is interesting, but I’m not too worried about it taking my job.” A lot has changed in three years. Today, I use AI nearlyRead More →

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Recently, while providing pastoral care to someone facing an especially difficult season, the person said something I have heard in different forms many times throughout my ministry: “I don’t know how people get through something like this without the Lord, without faith, and without a church family.” I understand the question. When life becomes heavy, like when we are grieving, frightened, exhausted, or facing circumstances we cannot change, we naturally wonder how anyone manages without something larger than themselves to hold onto. But if the question is how we make it through life’s hardest challenges entirely alone, I am not sure that we do. ItRead More →

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First, thank you. Thank you to everyone who prayed for our family and wished us well while we were away. We had a wonderful time exploring the Big Island, Maui, and Oʻahu. We experienced breathtaking landscapes, learned about the islands’ rich histories, and encountered people whose generosity and hospitality left a lasting impression on us. I’ll have more to share in the weeks ahead, but one lesson has stayed with me. Wherever we went, people spoke naturally and joyfully about what it means to be Hawaiian. Their identity wasn’t something they held tightly for themselves. They shared it freely—with stories, language, food, customs, music, andRead More →