Our country is being destroyed by ignorant, narrow-minded, arrogant, self-righteous Christians. They call themselves evangelicals, but throughout history they have been known by other names: tyrants, despots, hate mongers, fools… David Carlsson, Message to America, 2009 Hold on. I confess that there are ignorant, narrow-minded, arrogant, self-righteous Christians out there […]
The United Methodist Church… wants to… what? This is a question I asked for years when I worked for the General Board of Discipleship and travelled across the country. I let people fill in the blank, then pressed to be sure I understood what they meant. I came upon a […]
I had a conversation with a friendly atheist recently that leaves me scratching my head. The reason is that, as I have found so often to be the case, he wouldn’t play by his own rules. This young man wanted to only address what was “provable” as true, but kept […]
There is this great old Peanuts cartoon. Lucy is explaining to little brother Linus how the world works. She takes him to a tree in the yard and shows him the falling leaves. She explains that this is a normal occurence, one of those wondrous cycles of nature. She says […]
Oh, man, time to go fishin’ cause I opened up a can of worms! For ten straight days my Inbox has been full of emails concerning race relations in The United Methodist Church. The emails are troubling on two separate levels — one, that people don’t feel safe airing their […]
A few years ago I stood up in a meeting at the General Board of Discipleship and asked, “Has anyone else noticed how many deeply angry people we have in The United Methodist Church?” At first, a few puzzled folks asked what I meant, but I didn’t even have to […]
The concept of “sin” actually means “to miss the mark.” It doesn’t matter if you miss by an inch or miss by a mile — a miss is a miss is a miss. And there are four “sins” — ways we are “missing the mark” — prevalent in our congregational systems […]
I spent the day at the Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st Century (SBC 21) summit in North Charleston, South Carolina. The positive spirit and energy of this gathering is infectious, and the hopeful vision is noble. But this is a gathering of leaders from throughout our connectional system, […]
Thanks to bud Cathy Weigand for this video. She sent it to me with the lyrics which I print below. For me it is a brilliant metaphor for what a diverse, connectional system really looks like — discordant, messy, loud, kinetic, dynamic, frenetic, and always connected — each piece integral […]
United Methodist congregations seem to regularly get “stuck” in one (or more) of three places. Annual Conferences, too, share this affliction. Instead of channeling energy positively, it dissipates in non-productive — and sometimes damaging ways. Conversations tend to focus on problems to solve rather than possibilties. People get bogged down […]
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