So the time is finally here. The season most of our folks long for and the children actually pine for is here but are we as a church ready to fulfill those longings? Recently I sat in a team meeting where the focus wasn’t on planning for the Advent season but it did come up. My sense was that as a church we really weren’t ready for this moment.  By that I mean we were not ready to educate our congregation about the meaning of the season.

[Read more...]

“The most important book of the decade about emerging Christianity and the renewal of mainline congregations.” “This book is so full of good news that I keep it next to my Bible.”

Without denying the positive contribution and “good news” of Diana Butler Bass’s, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith, these two book jackets endorsements from religious heavy hitters: Marcus Borg and Barbara Brown Taylor, are a bit overstated. In spite of the author’s own hyperbole about the state of Christianity and more specifically the mainline churches of America and the effect of “neighborhood” churches in transforming the faith (individual lives being transformed in spiritual communities is better stated), there is a wonderfully refreshing description of “Ten Signposts for Renewal.” Our GRACE group, recently discussed at length Bass’s new book finding in it significant and hopeful pathways for church renewal. In facilitating that discussion, I noted with appreciation her grounding of the ten signposts in the rich tradition of “the faith once delivered to the saints” which, for me, was a much needed reclamation of these important disciplines and practices.

[Read more...]

In the midst of preparation to lead a retreat this weekend, with “Home for Christmas” as its theme, I’ve been reminded of the old adage about how the more things change, the more they remain the same.

The idea for this particular retreat came to me as “the holidays” were drawing to a close a year ago.  I had taken a hastily scheduled trip to Portland to spend a week with my younger sister, as she prepared to begin radiation and chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer.  That ordeal was to begin in January.  Meanwhile, we were to have a week of “sister time,” the week we usually had in August, but this year August had been consumed by our joint effort to connect, or reconnect, cousins – - her children, my children, their children – - whose homes are on opposite coasts.  That was before the cancer changed everything.

[Read more...]

For some of us who have been following with interest the “worship wars” of the past decades, there seems to be a tangible waning of the passions that fed the rhetoric. Arguably, the worship wars are over, all that is left is the occasional skirmish between the passionate of either camp. What remains today are distinctly delineated boundaries where the practicing faithful have settled into the comfortable landscapes of their preferred modes of worship.

[Read more...]