I know I am in the minority, but in a culture crazed for Christmas and Easter, my two favorite church holy-days are Pentecost and Maundy Thursday. I’ll get to Pentecost in about six weeks, but for now I want to think about what makes Maundy Thursday so significant for me. […]
It never fails that when I am looking for something in particular, I manage to find something else I was looking for months ago. Such is the case with interview notes I took in Colorado, Iowa, and Connecticut with 20-60 year old spiritual seekers. These notes have been the missing […]
No one sets out to offer vacuous, insipid, superficial, or self-absorbed worship. Pastors and lay leaders both dedicate themselves to creating meaningful, spiritual and authentic worship experiences. Yet, at a gathering of 21-29 year olds who have “given up on church” that took place in 2007 , these were the top […]
We live in a Wiki world. A collaborative, evolving, and highly interactive way of creating and recreating reality. Facts and opinions merge to create a new kind of “flexible” truth. Wikipedia has transformed the way we think about information and the authority of the written word. Knowledge is built over […]
Six year’s ago I worked with five Vanderbilt seminary students on a worship project. They attended dozens of Christian worship experiences in all sizes, shapes, forms, and cultures of United Methodist congregations, then we sat and “debriefed” each experience. One 27-year-old woman, Erin, an Episcopalian, made an unusual and provocative […]
I sat through another United Methodist worship service — this time bombarded by thumping, lively praise music extolling how awesome, moist, and shiny Jesus is. (If you’ve experienced ‘contemporary’ praise music, you know what I mean…) The energy was high, it was the theology that was missing. Everything was simple and […]
Among my greatest disappointments, not being able to follow-through on the UM Worship Patterns project is near the top. I have not engaged in a more interesting — and potentially helpful — project in all my time in research. This article is a companion to Theology of Worship? and Preacher […]
There is a wealth of irony within the gospel stories, but nowhere is the irony greater than in the synoptic stories we call “the Last Supper.” Jesus, facing imminent destruction, sitting with the ragtag bunch of bozos that still don’t quite get what is coming, loving them as dear friends […]
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 […]
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. […]
United Methodeviations 