I am the lead pastor at People's United Methodist Church in the Wisconsin Conference of The United Methodist Church, husband of my beautiful wife, Barbara, dad to my fantastic son, Josh and his wife Caroline, step-dad to my phenomenal son, Greg, his wife Hannah and our fabulous/glorious/perfect granddaughter Evie, author of seventeen books on spirituality, stewardship, congregational development, research, and spiritual gifts discovery, and an advocate for a more loving, inclusive church for the 21st century and beyond.
Disclaimer up front: don’t hold me to the veracity of the terms I am going to use. I am thinking out loud using terms and concepts I think I remember from a Philosophy lecture from my freshman year of college in 1976. I apologize in advance for everything I mis-remember… […]
Way back in the last century — 1988 to be exact — I prepared a sermon for the 250th anniversary of John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience. When I arrived on Sunday morning and looked at the bulletin, I realized that my title had a typo — instead of “Heart Strangely Warmed” the […]
By our fruits we will be known. What’s that smell? Why all the flies? What a waste. The rotten fruit of the Spirit is this: conditional love, repressed joy, fake peace, pretended patience, niceness passing as kindness, generosity to those who “deserve” it, narrow-minded faith-fullness, passive-aggressive gentleness, and demanding others […]
A church trial begins today. Amy De Long, one of our pastors, performed a same-sex marriage and openly proclaimed her personal relationship with a female partner. She did so in the context of a church that has not accepted either condition as “appropriate” of a United Methodist clergy-person. And so we […]
I am back from Annual Conference (and a few days off to recuperate…). My inbox is packed with mail from people who loved this year’s conference, hated this year’s conference, were proud of this year’s conference, were ashamed by this year’s conference, were excited by the delegation we elected to […]
Talk is cheap, and we talk – a lot! We think and plan and discuss and debate and envision and meet… to think and plan and discuss and debate and envision. We know there are problems, and we know there are solutions. We just can’t seem to figure out what […]
There is one phrase I hear that just drives me crazy when it comes to the Bible: I don’t interpret scripture; I just read it and do what it says. Basically, this is a false statement intended to end discussion by claiming that the person speaking has a crystal clear […]
While cleaning out some files the other day, I came across a folder of interviews I did in 2004 with 22 lifelong United Methodists who, in their 60s, 70s and 80s, made the decision to leave the denomination and join another church. These people did not make the choice based […]
Two of my colleagues have recently returned from renewal retreats, and it reminds me again how very critical spiritual self-care is for leaders, both clergy and lay. I conducted a variety of studies on clergy wellness, morale, self-care, renewal and spiritual practice when I worked for the General Board of […]
I have been reading Paul Watzlawick’s fun and funky, The Situation is Hopeless, But Not Serious — The Pursuit of Unhappiness. The central thesis of this short work is that human beings create their own unhappiness and discontent in dozens of creative unconscious ways. In one section, Watzlawick focuses on a […]
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