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On a hazy Sunday morning, the fourth floor of a dingy gray office building in Beijing is bursting with prayer....

As we encounter the post-resurrection Jesus in this week’s Gospel, brokenness and disappointment permeate—brokenness as thick as the morning mist off the Sea of Galilee, disappointment as pungent as the smell of fish.

And what would happen if we didn't?

I have a friend who visits his mother's burial site each year on the anniversary of her death. When the day comes, the mood is always solemn and deeply reflective--and tremendously difficult for other people in his life. What they don't know is that this annual ritual is generative, corrective. It helps anchor my friend for the rest of the year.  I have another friend who almost never visits his parents' gravesite.

Why do we eat soup during Lent? The question from a church member caught me a bit off guard as I was scrambling to get a few things together for a soup and bread Lenten lunch that our church was hosting last week. I don’t remember exactly how I responded. I think I vaguely gestured toward Lent being a season for embracing self-discipline and simplicity.

c. 2016 Religion News Service...

c. 2016 Religion News Service...

c. 2016 Advance Media...

c. 2016 Religion News Service...

To protest the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the election season, high school counselor Martha DeVries of North Kansas City, Missouri, is wearing a hijab every Monday until the end of the school year in ...

New communities spring up at coffeehouses, on Habitat for Humanity worksites, or at 5k races. What makes any of them a church?

Matt talks to Emily Scott, pastor of Saint Lydia's church in Brooklyn, about dinner table liturgy, the immediacy of homiletic dialogue, and writing sermons to elicit storytelling.

Our churches need more poetry. Especially during Holy Week. So this week, let us not be theologians or philosophers.

Journalist Chris Herlinger teams up with Paul Jeffrey, a United Methodist pastor and photojournalist, to tell stories of people who suffer from hunger and who work to combat it. The causes of hunger across the world—war, climate change, sexism, colonialism, political wrangling, unemployment—are woven into individual stories of those who are poor and hungry.

If the church is the bride of Christ, then Jesus is married to both Rachel and Leah—to the church he wants, and to the church he has to take.

During Holy Week, it's common for worship leaders to ask people to consider their place in the drama of Jesus' final days. To what extent do we betray him, deny him, insult him, crucify him? When do we, like the crowds, find ourselves gawking at suffering with prurient glee? When do we, like the thieves, alternately ridicule the truth, then believe in it? When do we, like the centurion, make our confession--though perhaps a moment too late?

Each year, I fast for Lent. The process is always transformative. After doing something for forty days, it becomes easier to maintain the discipline after Easter....

Together, the three volumes are five inches tall and weigh more than my children did when they emerged from the sea of their mother.

The biological concept of convergence lends credence to a Christian view of providence—and fits with a scriptural account of a story-shaped world.

When Jesus first walked into my life, I didn’t notice. There was no parade, no palms, no shouts of hosanna. I just started going to Sunday school. A couple of years later, I felt my first call to ministry but I didn’t recognize that for what it was either.