Ah, another Advent. The pressing question is: are we ready? Or maybe the pressing question is: do we even care? Our United Methodist Church can’t seem to be bothered with preparing for a Savior; we are too busy focusing on divisive issues of morality grounded in abominable biblical misinterpretation and […]
I am one small, lonely, lowly voice in a large mass (mob?) of United Methodists. One person cannot speak for the whole, but I want to engage in just such a thought exercise. I want to “test the house,” as it were. Here is my supposition about what WE ALL […]
Early on last week, I wrote that I was appalled by the behaviors I was seeing displayed by my United Methodist brothers and sisters. Some wrote back to say they didn’t know what I was talking about — that no one was behaving badly. Since then, Gere Reist, Secretary of […]
There are very few people here in Portland who would say that The United Methodist Church is in a good, healthy place (no, I don’t mean Portland). We have come to a crisis point, where we cannot say we are united in Christ, or of one mind, heart, soul, and […]
This General Conference has been a true test of what exactly we mean by “united” in United Methodist Church. What’s in a name? Is the “united” merely a carryover from our Evangelical United Brethren heritage, and therefore not a descriptive term? Is it an appellation that sounds fine, but has […]
This morning I posted a blog entitled Four Unpainted Corners, using a metaphor of four different groups in a large ballroom painting in opposite directions, ending up painted — as far from each other as possible — into the four corners of the space. Well, as we well know, metaphors […]
At what point should The United Methodist Church admit its failures and simply split over the issues of human sexuality raised by LGBTQI people and those in the church unwilling or unable to accept them? For me, the answer is simple — at the point that we admit that we […]
Television, especially the commercials, makes me sick this time of year. And not just now, but from Halloween on, when marketers nationwide begin the barrage of unrelenting crass consumeristic addiction-baiting, all in the name of Christmas. The cultural values of image, power, prestige, greed, consumption, acquisition, ownership, luxury, glamor, gluttony […]
Come on, people, is this any way for Christians to act? Do we live in a dangerous world? Yes. Are there people out there — of many faiths, colors, races, ethnicities, creeds, etc. — who are committed to doing harm? Yes. Are there overwhelming needs locally as well as globally? […]
As I get older, memory plays tricks, so I may be remembering this wrong, but a favorite Hebrew phrase of mine is hakarat harov, meaning “attending to the good” (I think…). It always comes to mind as I prepare for Thanksgiving, and I sometimes wonder what life is like for […]
United Methodeviations 