Theolog

Great is thy faithfulness?

By Debra Bendis

A few days ago I called a 15-year church member and friend whom I haven’t seen for 4 or 6 months—in church or elsewhere. I’ve canoed with this woman on church women’s outings, sat with her countless times in worship and laughed with her at congregational meals. I missed her, and was becoming concerned. I also hoped that she wasn’t doing a slow membership fade. Her response, after reassuring me that all was well, went something like this: “Lately I’ve found that larger groups just don’t seem to fit me. I’m in some smaller [nonchurch] groups: a book club. . .”

Tending to two vineyards

By Bob Cornwall

Perhaps it’s because I’ve received a call that will take me away from southern California’s wine country—but I’ve found myself meditating on the biblical image of the vineyard. I live in one of the nation’s great wine-making regions, made famous by that quirky comedy, Sideways.

Faith "extras"

By Matthew Phillips

Recently I held my newborn child for the first time. I gave thanks for the love his mother and I share and asked for the grace to show that love to him. Then my thoughts turned to the things my wife and I will teach him, and in particular, to our Christian faith.

We hear often now about public schools having to cut out offerings in the arts and languages because of finances or in order to teach to a test. What about his Christian education?

Broken for you

By Sarah S. Howell

For the third year running, I spent my spring break at Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico. The monks’ hospitality is unparalleled, the mesas of the high desert backdrop are breathtaking, and the peace and calm provided is a rare and precious treasure.

These monks are not afraid to use modern innovations within the reason and limits of the Benedictine Rule; their website makes that clear. On my first visit, a reality TV show was being filmed at the monastery. TLC’s The Monastery chronicled the lives of five men who spent 40 days living and working with the monks of Christ in the Desert. (See the show’s website here).

Rummaging

By Bromleigh McCleneghan

With the coming of spring, as we throw open church doors and windows to allow fresh air into our buildings and lives, we arrive once more in the season most likely to create distress and conflict: Rummage Sale Season.

Our church basement is full of junk, rummage that began accumulating several years ago (before my arrival, thank you) in closets and back hallways, but has now taken on one of a scientific property of a liquid: filling any space not already filled with something else.

Moving season

By Tom Steagald

At this time of year, my colleagues and I trade more phone calls and emails than usual. It’s a seasonal thing—a whopping increase of calls and emails related to “appointments.”

Appointment-making is the distinctive way in which United Methodist clergy are deployed to congregations. The bishop of a given area consults in the spring with the district superintendents of that area (the Cabinet) to mix and match the needs of particular congregations with the gifts and graces of available pastors. At the end of June, when the appointments are made and the moving list finalized, there is fruit-basket turnover.

Until then, rumors fly from one end of the conference to the other.

Hope in stained glass

By Trygve Johnson

Dimnet Chapel at Hope College has 12 large floor-to-ceiling window panels, with two stained glass saints captured in each window, 24 people in all. As the light breaks in the east, these stained saints begin to glow with the rising sun. These windows bear witness to something significant: each is a witness to the radical love of God.

This particular morning I sit under the window of Mary who is holding the Christ child in her arms. She looks peaceful. I find the image of her with a child comforting as I sit heavy, my head hanging. I don’t have the words to pray, but offer a sigh that sounds more like a groan. My faith feels out of joint.

Before I left the house, my wife Kristen told me the news. The test was negative. Again.

Eucharist plus

By Jason Byassee

Why do we feel the need to augment the dispensing of the eucharistic elements with some sort of personal touch?

It has become common in eucharistic celebration for the server to look deeply into the recipient’s eyes, and with great pathos, to say his or her name: “Billy Bob, the body of Christ, broken for you.” If we don’t know a name, we offer the most spiritual smile we can. I’ve seen servers grab the underside of the communicant’s forearm, or press the bread into her hands with both of hers, in a sort of Lord’s Supper handshake. All ways of adding a personal touch to the eucharist.

The problem is in the need to add anything at all.

In defense of children's sermons

By David Heim

If you mention the topic of children’s sermons to most experts on worship and liturgy, you’re likely to get a sour face and a sorrowful shake of the head.

“They are an unwarranted interruption in the flow of the liturgy,” they’ll say.

“They inevitably degenerate into cutesiness or worse,” another might say. “Pastors can’t help exploiting kids’ naive responses in order to delight the adults.”

“Children’s sermons inevitably become an ecclesial version of ‘Kids say the darnedest things’—a little comic relief in the midst of the service.”

Urban ministry and Joel Osteen

By Jason Byassee

The Chicago area is graced with a long history of faithful innovation in urban ministry. From Billy Sunday to Dwight Moody, from the beloved Joseph Cardinal Bernardin to Ray Bakke, from the Methodist Chicago Temple to Fourth Presbyterian, Christians here have tried to get their hands dirty. To have church in Chicago and not be gritty is not an option.

The heart and voice combo

By Debra Bendis

Soon after Thanksgiving every year, I crank up the volume on the classical FM stations, load my Bach, Britten and Brahms cds in the player, begin “music Sunday” rehearsals with the church choir, and prepare to soak up as much high Christmas music as I can in the all-too-short weeks of Advent and Christmastide.

How explain, then, that when a member of my family was hospitalized recently, the song from worship that came to mind and comforted me was not some classical treasure or church choir anthem? Instead, the song that steadied and grounded me, reminding me of the continuity of God in all life events, was written by a praise group called Casting Crowns.

Confirmed

By Amy Frykholm

I had never been an official member of a church until one Sunday last October.

I was baptized by my father into the Presbyterian Church as an infant, but by the time confirmation came along, I was participating wholeheartedly in a Baptist congregation. While I accepted the Baptists’ offer for another baptism, I refused the “hand of fellowship” for reasons clear only to my 12-year old mind. Twenty-some years went by. I attended Lutheran, Methodist, Quaker, Catholic and Episcopalian congregations. I had crises and renewals of faith, but I never had even an inkling of a desire to officially join anything.

Advent on campus

By Susan Olson

The new senior chaplain at my university recently sent out an email informing the staff that we would not be decorating the office or playing seasonal music during the holiday season. Some people were disappointed by this decision; I breathed a sigh of relief.

The decision was based on a desire to make the office space welcoming to students from a wide array of religious backgrounds. I support this whole-heartedly.

How comfortable is your religion?

By Amy Frykholm

When I got up to go to exercise class one frigid morning this month, I looked out over the icy expanse of white toward the backyard thermometer: -10 degrees.

Five miles away in the parking lot of a trailer park, other members of my small town were getting ready to dance on the Feast Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the predawn bitter cold, they dressed in elaborately and lovingly beaded tunics and pants—and, I hope, plenty of layers of wool and Lycra.

Rob Bell groupies?

By Debra Bendis

The line of people waiting to hear pastor and author Rob Bell (Mars Hill Bible Church) snaked around the block. Chicago was his first stop on a national tour. His subject: “the gods aren’t angry.”

The crowd was mostly young adults, and mostly evangelicals. Someone said, perhaps jokingly, of a friend who was late, “Oh he’s probably witnessing to someone down the street.” But I knew enough about Bell to not be spooked. He usually manages to irritate both mainliners and evangelicals.

Singing clergy

By Jason Byassee

Those clergy who get to sing are the luckiest. The rabbi at Shabbat services. The Catholic priest who sings as he holds up the consecrated elements, “through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit . . .” A Lutheran seminarian I know closes his office door to prepare for Sundays—he has to get ready to sing. It’s hard to beat a sung Eucharist in an Anglican church.

The point isn’t that these clergy are necessarily good singers: it’s that their community’s vision of worship requires them to break forth in song at certain points. What is it about that that seems, well, more religious somehow?

Love = love

By Sarah S. Howell

I have a t-shirt that says, “Gay? Fine by me.” I have another with stick figures in three pairs: one, a man and a woman; another, two men; the third, two women, and all with the caption “Love = Love.” I was raised to love people no matter what they look like or what they think or do. I am grateful for that. But I don’t wear those shirts often, because I find myself on the fence on this issue.

The question of ordaining gays has been brought very close to home as a young woman I know who wants to be ordained in the United Methodist Church has come out as a lesbian.

Somewhere

By Jenny Williams

As a teenager, when I went with friends to national youth conferences, people thought we were really cool because we came from Los Angeles. We all took off our nametags and wrote on them "Hug Me! I'm from California!" And they did.

Now I’m a United Methodist pastor serving two small churches in Lumberport and Shinnston, two towns in West Virginia that are only five miles apart, yet very distant from one another in the pecking order of our county. When I first arrived I would ask, "Are you from here?” thinking that "here" meant West Virginia, or even Appalachia. But to local people it meant the town in which they lived. Often they’d answer: "Oh NO! I'm not from here; I'm from Haywood”—a town that sits in between the two towns in which I pastor.

Whither clergy scholars?

By John Dart

The 2006 meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature in Washington, D.C., registered a record 10,000 attendees—roughly a 60-40 ratio of AAR and SBL members respectively—to hear papers, panel discussions, gab with friends, seek a job or book contract. That’s not likely to happen again, however: after their concurrent meeting November 17-20 in San Diego, the two organizations do not plan to assemble together again on a regular basis.

The moonlighting pastor

By Jonathan Marlowe

Wendell Berry says that all pastors should receive some training in the skills of a job such as farming, carpentry or some other trade so that when they step into the pulpit, they can tell the truth. The idea is that pastors would not be afraid to be blunt or honest because if they were “fired” for telling the truth they could always do something else, and thus would not be “trapped” in their jobs as professional clergy.

What if we took the point even further by suggesting that pastors have another job while they are pastors?

To hug or not to hug

By Jason Byassee

“Middle school bans hugging!” the headline screamed. Apparently Illinois youth at one school were so intertwined that hallway traffic became snarled, and the administration had to step in. Not content to rest her case on the importance of timely arrival in class, the principal added this nugget of wisdom: “Hugging is really more appropriate for airports or for family reunions than passing and seeing each other every few minutes in the halls.” The principals I remember hardly exuded warmth. Perhaps they’re the right people to police who hugs whom on school time.

The story made me think of the appropriateness of hugging after church.

Advancing dialogue

By Jason Byassee

“I spent the first 18 years of my life as a Catholic, and was never once encouraged to read the Bible. Why not?”

It was the sort of direct, impassioned question one rarely hears asked in polite ecumenical dialogue. The panelists, two evangelicals and two Catholics, squirmed a bit before Father Tomas Baima (Mundelein Seminary) replied with consummate grace, “Your priest probably thought reading the Bible was a Protestant thing to do, so he didn’t tell you to do it. We all practice ‘over-against’ logic.” The evangelicals’ answers to questions about the sacraments and Mary suggested the same sort of “we don’t because they do” theology. John Armstrong of Wheaton College told listeners that evangelicals are busily reappraising the role Mary has in salvation.

"Community" churches

By Julie Clawson

When I embarked on the journey of planting a church, one thing I didn't expect was the "denomination" issue. When we “planters” told people who we were, they’d ask, "What denomination are you?" (The first question was "What’s a church planter?", we had to clarify that the process involved starting a new church, not a garden). To the denomination question the answer (at least for us) was easy—nondenominational. But that just didn’t make sense to most of the people we encountered.

Candid charismatic

By John Dart

In these days of voluminous e-mailboxes, I’m always glad for the weekly columns by J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine. An engaging writer who is refreshingly candid about the charismatic-Pentecostal world, Grady is a solid believer in the gifts of the Spirit and admittedly conservative on most social issues. But he also chides charismatics who abandon common sense and critical thinking, and occasionally risks the disfavor of readers with his relatively liberal views on such issues as immigration and the lack of opportunity for talented women ministers.

Faith, certainty, and Tom Cruise

By Julie Clawson

I grew up in a Texas dispensationalist church (I'm sure they would merely call themselves a “biblical” church). Most of my experiences there occurred in the youth group. But this was no games and cool music youth group. It was a “sit and listen to hour-long sermons, read lots of books, attend seminars, and make fun of those not like us” group. Being a Christian meant cramming oneself with knowledge about the Bible. We had to know exactly how to argue people into the faith and how to show them that whatever they believed (atheist, pagan, Catholic or Baptist) was completely wrong. I loved it. As a nerd who prided herself on her good grades, this was a religion I could relate to. My "faith" was all about facts and knowledge. So while most of the youth group dreaded attending (their parents made them), my small group of friends and I loved being know-it-all star Christians.

Ghost’d up

By Jason Byassee

When Jeremiah Wright of Trinity UCC in Chicago lectures about preaching, he gets down to the specifics: like how inadequate every preacher, even he, can feel sometimes. One day he was to preach after one his homiletical heroes, Charles Adams, pastor of the great Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit. Wright and his preacher-father had a habit of calling each other the night before they were to preach to ask each other this question: “You Ghost’ed up?” That is, are you full of the Holy Ghost, ready to preach tomorrow? The night before Wright was to preach after Adams, the quick and easy answer to his dad was, “No.”

Hunger for Wisdom

By David Heim

After a number of his parishioners admitted to him that they sometimes attended the megachurch in the suburbs, a tall-steeple pastor decided to check out the competition. He found the music insipid, as he expected. He was surprised to find that the sermon was, well, boring. Instead of engaging the rich texts of scripture, the preacher offered a Power Point outline of seven Christian principles for living.

A few weeks later, the pastor had a chance to ask one of his parishioners what he liked about the sermons at the megachurch. The parishioner responded: “They offer Christian principles for living.”

A welcoming congregation

By Robert Cornwall

When my congregation decided that being a place of welcome would be one of our core values, we had to figure out what this meant in practice. We had to ask if there were limits to welcome.

For generations churches have wrestled with this question, and in many ways we’ve not evolved very much. The role of women and the challenges of segregation remain with us decades after the suffrage movements and the Civil Rights movement. Now homosexuality is the issue that vexes our congregations and denominations and threatens to divide global fellowships. Many in the church would like to see this issue go away; they try to ignore it, believing it won’t affect their church. But if we run from this issue, our claims to be places of welcome become hollow and superficial—unless being a place of welcome simply means that if you’re like us, we’ll be nice to you.

For a long time I believed that homosexuality wasn’t an appropriate Christian lifestyle. Homosexuals could come to church, but if  they wanted to be part of the church then they needed to change who they were. Then my brother came out.

Lectionary fade?

By Anthony B. Robinson

Is devotion to the Common Lectionary fading? In the ‘70s and ‘80s many mainline Protestant preachers embraced the Common Ecumenical Lectionary for a variety of reasons: to combat biblical illiteracy in congregations, to make sure sermons were biblical, to witness to the unity of the church, to ensure a wider variety of scripture on the congregation's menu, and to enhance coordination with music and education programs.

But my own unscientific soundings suggest that Common Lectionary usage is not as common as it once was.

Gothic, finery, and ecumenism

By Jason Byassee

There’s nothing unusual today about a Protestant church in America that’s built in a gothic architectural style, although a recently published book shows this was not always the case. In fact, Protestants once repudiated not only gothic architecture, but also crosses, choir robes, liturgical seasons, altar tables and even flowers (!) in their worship. All of these were too “Romish” and “popish” for evangelical forebears. Start building gothic churches and pretty soon you’ll be wearing a chasuble and elevating a host.

Hearing a call to the monastic life?

By Debra Bendis

Abbot Primate Notker Wolf, the highest representative of the Benedictine Order, traveled from Sant’Anselmo (the International Pontifical Benedictine University in Rome) last week to speak at the first-year anniversary of the newly created ecumenical Benedictine community—Holy Wisdom Monastery in Middleton, Wisconsin.

Postliberal congregations?

By David Heim

The impact of Radical Reformation theology or, more broadly, postliberal theology (through the force of figures like Lindbeck, Milbank and Hauerwas) on mainline Protestants in recent decades has been impressive. It seems to have shaped intellectual discussion at least as much as the neo-orthodoxy movement did in the 1940s and 1950s

Stolen goods

By Jason Byassee

Tom Long’s recent piece on plagiarism is important. I had hoped that the number of instances of plagiarism I’ve bumped into was abnormal, but I fear it is not. I’m thinking of a senior minister who downloads every word of every sermon, and of another prominent cleric who preached a plagiarized sermon at a funeral for a fellow minister, with loads of other clergy present (you didn’t think any of them would notice?)

Watch your language!

By Richard A. Kauffman

“Our words matter. We have to think with care about them and to try and know something of how they will be heard.” Rowan Williams

A few years ago I asked a prominent evangelical theologian in an evangelical setting: “When did the language of ‘accepting Jesus Christ as personal Savior (and Lord)’ come into the Protestant vocabulary?”

Pastors writing badly

By Lillian Daniel

Why do pastors write so poorly for their own church newsletters? When I scan the monthly missives that cross my desk with the daily mail, I see their front pages, saved for the pastor, wasted on a throw-away paragraph, a canned story from the Internet or a few sentences from a reference book (“Webster’s dictionary defines Lent as …”)

These are not people who are writing impaired, mind you.

No more guilt by association

By John Dart

The recent launch of “Christian Churches Together” will not make the list of top ten religion stories of 2007. It could, however, rank high among the year’s most significant developments.

Blended worship on campus

By Craig Kocher

When I walked into the chapel at Hope College on a Sunday night late last spring, I worried that my worst fears about faddish campus ministry would be realized. A large stage had been built where an altar should have been and I didn’t see a Christian symbol anywhere near the six guitar players, who were letting loose as if opening for Jars of Clay.

Abundance in poverty

By Jason Byassee

I was in Kansas City recently to work on a story. I could have stayed in cool, hip Midtown, or a decent hotel anywhere, but friends invited me to stay with them at Cherith Brook, a new Catholic Worker house in a rough part of town.

I should qualify “Catholic Worker.” The friends who started Cherith Brook are Presbyterians.

Are short-term mission trips a waste?

By Susan Olson

Mai-Anh spent spring break in Florida volunteering at a camp for children with life-threatening illnesses. Now she will tell anyone willing to listen that the trip, an alternative spring break trip sponsored by the chaplain’s office, has changed her life.

Pastor as patient

By Jonathan Marlowe

I have been to the hospital so many times for someone else’s surgery that it’s second nature. I put on my clergy badge, which makes me feel official and professional, and show up at the hospital door all smiling and cheerful. I try to make small talk about the weather or the game on TV last night, thinking that might take their minds off troubles and ease their anxiety. Until recently, I didn’t know if my efforts worked or not. They might just have been too nice to tell me it doesn’t.

But now I know.

Church in a truck

By Jason Byassee

Our new church arrived Saturday. It came in a trailer packed with enormous ingenuity by Portable Church Industries. We’ve been calling it “a church in a truck.”

Sound strange?

Let me back up.

Is blended worship possible?

By Debra Bendis

A comment that I overheard after worship Sunday made me wonder if my 350-member Midwestern small-town congregation is the last church still experiencing skirmishes over music styles. Have other churches broken through the contemporary/traditional impasse and come out of it with a music program of integrity characterized by a variety of styles? Or are most, like us, still floating in an unhappy purgatory between musical poles?

Potluck gourmet

By Lillian Daniel

Why it is that people eat food in church that they wouldn’t eat anywhere else? My ecclesiastical food habits go back to early childhood, when I wasn’t allowed to drink Kool-Aid at home, except during my birthday parties. On those occasions I waited eagerly as my mother combined cupfuls of pure sugar and one tiny slim packet of neon-colored flavoring to make a pitcher of that utterly nonnutritious cocktail.