Can retiring pastors mentor their own successors?
Now that 60 is the new 50, creative models are emerging for ministry transitions.
A freelance wedding that didn't fit my script
The gig seemed fairly routine. Then I saw the parrots.
Mission trumps size
Many of us might assume that a church with only 32 members automatically qualifies as a “struggling church,” or even a dying church. But in the case of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Keansburg, New Jersey, many of us would be wrong.
The church on fire
Recently I visited a nearby country church with a tumultuous history. Built in a berg called Klondike, it was originally a Catholic church. In the ’90s, the building was hit by lightning. The volunteer fire department bravely climbed up into the attic and put the fire out, at some risk to their own lives. Repairs were made and the church went on.
But a few years later, in 2005, the diocese closed the church, and its members migrated to another nearby parish.
The church after Katrina
A couple of weeks ago I went on an unforgettable mission trip to New Orleans and encountered a church that gave me a lot to think about.
Prince of Peace Missouri Synod Lutheran Church was once a thriving church and school. It was flooded when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed thousands of homes, businesses, and community buildings along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Alabama in 2005.
The task of the storyteller
I told a story in church one Sunday. It was not just my story; it was a shared story from my family that had only been told quietly for a long time. Maybe it was a confession. After telling it I felt spent, as if something powerful had moved through me.
To be a storyteller is like having an electric current move through your body.
Resurrection and Ralph
I ran into Ralph at the café. Ralph is a retired paper mill worker, a Vietnam vet, and a self-proclaimed “wise sage” who drives everyone in the café crazy with his incessant theological chatter. He always interrupts my sermon preparation. He wants to talk about God or Jesus or numerology or the chickens he’s raising. But most times, I come away from a conversation with him having yielded a little jewel of insight.
This time it was a big one.
Holy stuff: Whats left when a church closes
"The church is not a building," says the song. Yet most churches have walls, a basement, and decades of accumulated accoutrements.
The wedding flees the church
So, 34 couples got married in a live, mass wedding during the Grammy Awards. Queen Latifah (no, not ordained) officiated at the ceremony, against a projected image of stained glass windows....
A church without a font
Baptism is the ritual doorway through which we enter Christian life. So I always found it strange that one of my churches had no font....