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.
This is the reprint of an article that appeared in The Wittenberg Door (September/October 2007), Alive Now! and on the General Board of Discipleship website, and a sequel to yesterday’s, The Church in the Plastic Bubble. Since I wrote the original article, I discovered that this is not an aberration, […]
A week ago I posted a blog entitled, Driven to Abstraction, where I shared a story of a young pastor disillusioned with his congregation after they refused to accept the presence of homeless people in their midst. Today I received an email that I know was meant to be helpful, […]
Man, what a can of worms! In two days I have received over 30 emails “helping” me to understand: the emergent movement the emerging church Emergent Village the emergent church The Emerging Church the emerging movement the Emergent Church the emerging and missional church The Missional Church emerging spirituality And […]
Having now had some involvement with three Annual Conferences and watching the ReThink Church campaign rolled out, I have had ample opportunity to talk to hundreds of United Methodists about it. Let me say clearly up-front: United Methodists love this campaign. Each video receives a strong ovation. The resources literally […]
A pastor came up to me with a devilish grin on his face. “Have you seen this?” he asked, shoving a copy of an email under my nose. It seems I irritated a prominent, high profile pastor of one of our premiere large membership congregations with my thoughts on the […]
For the past fifteen years I have had opportunities to meet with a wide variety of congregational, conference, and agency leadership teams to look at their processes and practices. Generally, I am there by invitation to offer insights and suggestions for improvement. One of my most frequent suggestions often meets […]
“Are you emerging?” the young pastor asked as he shook my hand. He has been reading my blog, and simply had to know. At first I looked down to see if I had come untucked, then I realized what he was asking (a variation on “are you emergent?”). I never […]
I sat in worship, praying the congregational prayer as written in the bulletin: gracious God, protect those who serve you as agents of light, and strike down all those who serve as agents of darkness…” I stumbled over the words as if I struck my shin on a misplaced table. […]
Recently, a young pastor shared this story with me. He and his congregation studied Vital Signs together over a year ago, and they have been working to balance their inward focus (ministries for the membership) with an outward focus (ministries to the community). He thought the church was doing a really […]
A story: Once upon a time, there was a small village of about 100 people. For as long as anyone could remember, the population had remained essentially the same. Each year, on average, seven babies were born, but due to poor conditions five of them died in infancy or early […]
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