I am still wrestling with a shock I had the other day. A person I know and respect was asked to pray for the situation in Syria. I consider this person to be a fair-minded, mature Christian committed to love, peace, harmony and justice. For this reason, I was shocked […]
I am deeply distressed by the state of prayer in The United Methodist Church – at least among pastors. As I am visiting with clergy leaders, I am asking about their personal devotional lives, and far and wide I am finding that many have no personal devotional life. I have […]
I haven’t been able to blog for a couple of weeks due to an unusually heavy work/travel load, and an unusually large response to a recent post. Every once in a while I will write something that I believe is a “no-brainer” — it’s not overly profound or insightful, but […]
I may get blasted on this. That’s okay. I am sharing almost twenty years of similar responses here, and I think we — especially clergy — need to listen. Laity across the United Methodist Church are sending four messages loud and clear: prayer, stewardship, evangelism and Bible are NOT being […]
There are times when Christians drive me absolutely nuts. One way this happens is when I hear well-meaning and sincere Christians confuse faith and superstition, relying on prayer as a magical talisman or incantation. I listened to a United Methodist colleague share recently that he no longer prays because it […]
Growing up in the Midwest in the 1960s, we had a term for people too stupid to live — prayer stupid. The not-all-too-sensitive meaning was that prayer was all that was left for these folks — they had no other options. Their guardian angels were beaten, tattered, and torn — […]
Various recent studies and articles note an upswing in the practice of prayer in American culture. Must be a good thing, right? More prayer, more devotion to God? More prayer, more kindness and compassion in the world? More prayer, more attention to God’s will? Not so much. The increase in prayer […]
I sat in worship, praying the congregational prayer as written in the bulletin: gracious God, protect those who serve you as agents of light, and strike down all those who serve as agents of darkness…” I stumbled over the words as if I struck my shin on a misplaced table. […]
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