I am a reader, and proud of it. I rarely spend less than 3 hours each day reading, and I mean books, not just emails, articles, blogs, letters, ads, magazines, Post-It® Notes, etc. On days off, I read more like 6-7 hours. I am an eclectic reader. There are few […]
Yesterday, I had the great honor to launch a new learning academy in our annual conference — something we have been talking about for a long time, but for a variety of reasons couldn’t get launched earlier. We are attempting a conference-wide, ongoing Leadership Learning Academy for clergy and laity […]
Four recent conversations point out a serious (and growing) problem in many of our congregations: we don’t know what to do with smart people who ask tough questions. I have had (intentional) encounters with people in the state of Wisconsin who have visited United Methodist congregations and found them lacking. […]
I was talking with a small group of young adults about the potential of the church to transform the world. My argument was simple: if we would strive to find a meaningful way to engage 7 million plus United Methodists in the United States in some form of life-affirming missional […]
Okay, here’s an easy one: “and they’ll know we are Christians by our —– love idiocy hate bigotry I want to choose #1, but in light of the current news about an evangelical whack-job in Florida who wants to commemorate September 11 with the burning of the Koran, I am […]
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 […]
This past week I have been embroiled in discussion and debate about our openness to highly intelligent, well-educated people in our United Methodist Church. First, I have been surprised by the number of people from our churches who think poorly of smart people — assuming that they deserve anything that happens […]
All I did was ask questions. People would make broad statements and I would ask, “How do you know?” People would claim supernatural and paranormal explanations and I would ask, “Is there another explanation?’ Attributes would be given to God that didn’t come from the Bible and I would ask, […]
I surf a lot of sites and listen in on a lot of discussion threads about what people choose and choose not to believe. What is interesting is that both sides deny they are making a choice about what to believe. Dogmatism swings both ways, and many loud voices on […]
I have been following this year’s edition of the so-called “war on Christmas” with a mix of amusement and incredulity. Apart from Fox news and a few conservative-fundamentalist TV stations, I’m not hearing too much about it, but what I do hear and see boggles the imagination. My favorite this […]
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