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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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Do any of you still pause to pick up an acorn on your walks? Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about an acorn that makes me pause, makes me smile. Which is just what happened last week while away at the NIC School of Leadership in Green Lake, WI. I was enjoying a bit of quiet time down by the lake when the acorns all around seemed to speak to me. Hundreds of them, on sidewalks, in the grass, everywhere! Really, they are such a small thing. Easy to step on without much more than a crunch underfoot. But I remember that this timeRead 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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A new school year brings a new season. For some that means a new classroom, a new teacher, or a new school. For others, it may mean returning to a familiar place, continuing a journey already underway…or it may just mark the beginning of earlier mornings and the start of pumpkin spice season. Whatever it brings for you, each of us arrive carrying something different. Some of us carry new bookbags filled with tech and supplies. Some carry well-loved bags that have been part of many school years. Teachers and staff, no doubt carry their classroom supplies and their responsibilities. Parents and caregivers carry schedules,Read More →