L. Gail Irwin
In defense of the interim
An interim ministry position is a funny gig. The Interim is not called but hired. S/he is not installed, not permanent, and often not paid as much as the “permanent” (or “settled”) pastor. I knew early on that interim work is viewed as a second-tier career track when a guy at a nursing home said, “You’re a pretty good preacher. I’ll bet you could be a real minister.” I didn’t bother to tell him I’ve been a “real minister” for 25 years.
Whose transformation?
I once had occasion to meet with a potential confirmation student at a Subway restaurant. He was 6 feet tall, dressed like a punk and played in a rock band....
My father's map
My father once sat me down on the couch and placed a map of Central Europe in my lap. He pointed to two major cities and said, ”We have five months to get from London to Copenhagen....
The multifaith campus
I’ve written elsewhere about Springhouse Ministry, a church building shared by three congregations of different denominations in south Minneapolis. Here is a story about three congregations of different faiths that are now sharing space on Long Island.
Brought here to love others
I like to read the mission notes in our UCC/DOC Global Ministries e-mailings, and I always give special attention to those written by my seminary classmate Jeff Mensendeik, who does mission wo...
A temporary church
A church I once served was born in a cheese warehouse, grew, purchased property, built a building, grew some more, plateaued, added an addition, declined and closed—all in a 50-year timespan....
Shelving the past
I called my carpenter friend Daryl when I needed some bookshelves installed on the wall of our tiny spare room. I have a collection of books that I had no room to store....
A breath of fresh dreaming
Recently, I was lucky to sit in on a meeting with a church’s governing board, their interim pastor and a church consultant. The congregation had planned to seek a settled, full time...
Should we sell our church building?
I know some of you have a love/hate relationship with your church buildings. Your church’s floors may have asbestos in them and the roof may leak and the sanctuary is not wheelchair accessible. Maybe you are secretly hoping for a strategically placed tornado.
Or maybe you should sell your building? Wouldn’t that make life easier?
First responders of last resort
Whenever something sad or evil happens in the world, I think of the church....
Why are you kind?
We played “Stump the Pastor” at my church recently. Everyone wrote down a question about the bible, the church or theology, and I drew them out of two baskets—one for kids and one for adults—and tried to answer them on the spot.
Of course, we only got a few answered in the 15-minute sermon slot. The rest of the questions were left on my desk to rummage through on Tuesday morning. Some were designed to trick me (How many animals did Moses take on the ark?); some were skeptical (How many mistakes has God made?) and some were sad (If we are spirits in heaven, how will I recognize my loved ones?). And then, one question made my heart skip a beat.
Mendicants and anchorites
At first they sounded to me like the names of medieval cricket teams, but it turns out that mendicants and anchorites were actually two different types of ancient monastics....
The scars of loss
I casually asked a parishioner the other day how he lost his hand. I knew it happened when he was a young man, so I didn’t expect him to get emotional....
What I'm learning from grief
We have seen a lot of death around here lately. Last summer, our neighbor came by to tell us he was throwing a block party. Two weeks later, he had a heart attack and died....
About the stuff
About a week after my mother-in-law died, I went by her house to borrow her sieve....
Closed
It happened again today. I drove up to one of my favorite cafes in a nearby town and was shocked to find it closed. I don’t mean closed today. I mean closed forever. But they knew me there! They knew I liked those vanilla creamers and my eggs poached hard! I sat with the engine running, hungry and caffeine-deprived, wondering where I would go for breakfast. Why didn’t they warn me? I would have come by to say good-bye.
A simpler church
Anthony Robinson said it well in a recent Stillspeaking devotional. Maybe the future of the church is a lot simpler than it is today. Breaking bread, prayers, learning about the word and caring for the lost are the simple acts Jesus led his little band to engage in.
Should churches help each other?
Sometimes, when one church is struggling, another church helps out. One church I interviewed (for the From Death to Life project) was a new ethnic church development that was
given a building, basically for free, from a church that died. But we
all know you get what you pay for, and the building they got had more
than a few structural problems. They received some support for the
pastor’s salary from their denomination, but the building was weighing
them down with repair bills.