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.
The recent report from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) is making the news: fewer and fewer Americans “got religion.” Over the past two decades, the number of people identifying themselves as having “no religion” climbed from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. There are slightly more […]
In the competitive church market, where ministry heavyweights duke it out for supremacy with ever greater programmatic offerings, ever larger campuses, ever bigger high definition broadcast screens and quality technical equipment and expertise (I saw where a church in Georgia recently hired a production manager for $225,000 per year…), mid- […]
I have some very faithful friends who have continued to collect data and information for research projects I launched but was unable to complete. One of the questions we began exploring last summer is “What are people looking for in a sermon?” We asked this of three separate audiences: long-time […]
The Bible should not be used as a weapon. It should not be used as a legalistic dividing wall to separate the acceptable from the unacceptable. And it should never be used to justify hate, anger, ugliness, judgmentalism, prejudice, or evil.
I’ve received a number of emails and phone calls asking if I am going to weigh in on the GracePoint UMC/GracePoint Community Church (Wichita, KS) split story. Well, yes and no. I don’t know enough about the specific story to comment intelligently, but on the surface and in general this appears to […]
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve posted a couple blogs — “An Ash Wednesday Reflection” and “The ‘Bob the Southwest Airlines Gate Attendant’ Personality Type Indicator” — that caused people to send me to this video. If you want to spend the best 15 minutes of your day, check it […]
For the entire 20th century, worship was the centerpiece of congregational life in the United States. As the first decade of the 21st century nears its end, this is no longer true. Experiential learning is the “new” worship in many mainline churches, with service to others hot on its heels. […]
I had a nice long wait to catch a flight from Phoenix the other day, so I struck up a conversation with an incredibly friendly Southwest Airlines gate attendant named Bob. I was interested in finding out if the change in boarding process (for years Southwest boarding was like a feeding […]
March — in like a lamb, in a like a lion. Zombie Congregations, The Urgency Element and Confirmation Consternation (recent posts) are generating some fun attention. New in “Buzz” is a capsule review of the March Book of the Month — John Nuessle’s, Faithful Witnesses — a fine book on mission and […]
Worship Connection posted an interesting article by Shane Raynor this week, Reinventing Confirmation. As I read it, I experienced a strange ambivalence — agreeing with many of the observations Shane makes while feeling like something was missing. Some of the insightful points in the article challenge the “one size fits […]
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