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.
I got an email this week from a lifelong Methodist who writes: You do realize, don’t you, that you have a very limited appeal? The majority of United Methodists are extremely happy with the way things are. Really? We are happy with losing credibility? We are happy that more people […]
I have been writing recently about reframing our current conversation about the church from one of doom, gloom, decay, and demise to one of faith, hope, vision and relevancy. My central thesis is that we are unlikely to attract new people with the message, “Our ship is sinking and we […]
Man, I will never forget where I was May 21 when the world ended… oh, wait, that never happened. Most of the people I know and talk to didn’t give Harold Camping’s latest rapture prediction any credence, but I was amazed at how much airplay and interest is actually got. […]
Two passing conversations yesterday stuck with me. I got a call from a former colleague and current retired bishop who asked if I were planning to go to General Conference. I responded that it would be up to the conference whether I get elected or not. His reply to me […]
I read an article a few years ago that stated that our brains are hardwired to avoid ambiguity. Even though mature reasoning demands a high level of abstract thinking and working through contradictions, conundrums, and puzzles, the normal state is one of binary certainty. We want our lives to operate in […]
I am not (generally) a fatalist, especially when it comes to God. I do not envision a God with too much time on his/her anthropomorphized hands, idly messing with human beings — poking here and there to see what jumps, steering a tornado into one group instead of another, giving […]
Working for the church, first at the denominational level, then at the conference level, I am surprised at how often people will open their communication with me with the words, “You need to understand…” A more narcissistic and ego-centric phrase may not exist, because the people who open with such […]
I am heartbroken. There are those in the Christian church who want to hate and call it love. I was listening to a young, self-proclaimed evangelical preacher talking about the Bin Laden situation on a Wisconsin radio station yesterday, and the gist of his argument is this: as Christians, we […]
It has been an Old Testament couple of days. We finally eye-for-an-eyed/tooth-for-a-toothed Osama Bin Laden, and it has been remarkable to see the wide array of reactions. Vengeance, joy, relief, sorrow, anger — and the ringing proclamation “justice has been served.” But whose justice? Justice is about balancing the scales, […]
It is time to take the “me” out of Methodism and replace it with “we”. Somewhere we lost touch with the fact that this is God’s church and that each of us is fortunate and blessed to be allowed to be a part of it. The church does not exist […]
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