Authors /
Steve Woolley
Steve Woolley is a retired small-town preacher. He blogs at Country Parson, part of the CCblogs network.
Bearing arms in America
The individual right to gun ownership is the law of the land. Until it isn't.
What is a golden calf?
What exactly is a golden calf? You know the story. Moses was up on the mountain for a long time working with God on plans for a place of worship and the rituals to go along with it. Meanwhile, the people down below figured he had abandoned them and asked Aaron to do the same according to their own plans, which he did by constructing a golden calf and declaring a festival to YHWH. He didn’t declare a festival to some other god, he declared it to the LORD, and that was just fine with the people.
I don’t think this story is about a statue of a calf made of gold, nor do I think it’s about worshiping idols.
Responding to violence without deadly force
Even our small city has its share of violent incidents requiring a forceful response from police. Maybe we’ve been lucky, or maybe being in a small city makes a difference, or maybe our police and sheriff departments are well-trained and well-disciplined. Whatever the reason, we have not had to face questions about whether the police were justified in using deadly force.
Recently an armed man with a history of violence sent a text to another household that he was on the way to kill them.
Advice to prudent preachers
Max Stackhouse, in his essay on “Public Theology and Ethical Judgment,” asks, “What allows human life to flourish so that the common life can flourish?” If it is a question that is ever asked in th...
When is the end of life?
My friend Bill died recently. A brilliant scholar, he had suffered a number of strokes, and was being cared for in a facility that catered to patients with dementia and brain injuries. He decided that it was time to let nature take its course. He refused most food and medications, and died in short order, but he died fully confident in the resurrection life that lay ahead.
A few weeks later I was in the ER with a man in his mid-to-late nineties who had also suffered from a number of strokes.
Loving my neighbor, but only for 40 days in Lent
Loving the people I don’t like. That was my Lenten discipline last year, and it is again. I’ve not made much progress in the last 12 months. It started with some prayerful reflection on what it means to love God and neighbor as the most important part of fulfilling the deepest intention of the law. Neighbors are not always easy to love, especially if you don’t like them. The generalized Christian claim that “I love everybody” just doesn’t cut it.
Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
I was in a museum not long ago gazing at a painting of Jesus washing Peter’s feet, a familiar scene to most of us, and wondering why it seemed very wrong. What was wrong was that Jesus was pictured as a mature but young man while Peter was very old and gray. We forget that, if Jesus was in his early thirties, it is likely that his disciples were no older and probably younger by several years.
Page down Facebook until you come to the inevitable shot of a group of young adults in their mid-to-late twenties having a good time, and that’s more like it.
How important is a personal relationship with Jesus?
How important is a personal relationship with Jesus? Some of my evangelical friends define Christianity as a personal relationship with Jesus. Everything else is adiaphora, except maybe the worship leading praise band. Even some of my Episcopalian colleagues argue that a personal relationship with Jesus should be the aim of growth in Christian faith. My problem is that I don’t know what a personal relationship with Jesus is.
On having enough
I was talking with some younger friends recently, and the subject of having enough came up....
The invisible wall
Not long ago I was talking with friend who has become the pastor of a church in his small home town. He’s been there for a few years, having been away for 20, and has found himself among people he has known all his life. The parish council president, for instance, is an old classmate from nursery school through high school. Some of his elderly parishioners are his old teachers. He knows almost everyone on Main Street, regardless of their denomination or lack thereof.
What’s got to him, he said, is the invisible wall that has been constructed between him and all these old friends.
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Ownership and stewardship
My family did some major remodeling of our house over the last three or four years. I think we are finally done. A friend asked me if it was a wise investment: would we ever see the market value of the place exceed what we put into it?
No, it's unlikely that the market value of the house will ever surpass what we've spent on it, but, as I said to my friend, we don't really own it anyway, we're just stewards of it for a time.
On interring 300 persons known to God alone
Recently I helped inter the remains of almost 300 persons who had been lingering, unclaimed, on storage closet shelves in the county coroner’s office. Some of them had been there since the 1940s....
Time and space in Mark
Mark has been a constant puzzle to me. I didn’t much care for it for a long time. His sense of urgency and spareness of narrative left me feeling I was reading the Cliff Notes of scripture....
So where is the line?
This is an article about worship in traditions other than one’s own, but it begins with CPE....
What are supply clergy?
What are supply
clergy? Are they merely ordained persons who are authorized to use the
costume, magic words and hand motions needed to legitimize an hour of
worship while the life of the congregation goes along without them quite
well, thank you very much?
I'd love to tell the story, but I don't know it
Once again, while at an ecumenical clergy gathering, I heard the call
for the Church to become missional, this time from a Presbyterian.