When visiting a friend’s office, I enjoy snooping through perusing the shelves. Sometimes I find something that is exactly what I need for a particular situation. Sometimes I’m reminded of old favorites that I had nearly forgotten. This week we asked several young clergy women serving ministries outside of the parish to recommend resources that [...]
Becoming the Church Mom
by Heather Culuris Each Mother’s Day at worship, one of my first call churches in the mountain valleys of Pennsylvania gave out flowers to all the women of the congregation. The children came forward at the end of the Mother’s Day service and walked out into the small congregation bringing a flower to each woman [...]
Visual Reflections on the Lectionary
by Sara Olson-Smith How do you immerse yourself in the biblical text? For one young clergy woman, visual art is key to the process. She writes, "I believe through images and the act of creating, the Spirit engages us and gives us new eyes to see the unseen God alive in our lives and in [...]
Better Together
by Jenn Moland-Kovash When I began seminary, my husband was finishing, so the question du jour was, “Would you ever work together?” To which I responded with a resounding, “NO!” We’re too competitive, too insecure, I’d say. It would never work. But as I moved through school and into my first call, and he settled [...]
Miles to Go
A sermon on Lamentations 1:1-12 and John 11:17-37, by Amy Summers-Minette Though it is in our lectionary, our Lamentations text – this prayer of pain and petition – is not something we hear every day. I doubt many of us could quote from Lamentations as easily as we could from Psalms, from Isaiah, or from [...]
Being Single, Being Me
by Stacey Midge I began seminary with several single classmates, but our number was significantly reduced over the three years we spent there. By senior year, it seemed like a mass headlong rush to the altar. Those of us who had not joined the stampede mostly avoided the topic, as though voicing it would speak [...]
There’s No Crying in Baseball
by Katherine Willis Pershey It’s happened too often to write it off as a fluke. There was that one time in the pulpit, and again the Sunday after Hurricane Katrina hit. At the last board meeting, once during choir rehearsal, and of course the day after we found out our beloved dog was dying of [...]
In it for the long haul
by Carol Howard Merritt We’ve been in our home for a year now. In actuality, it’s been almost two years, but that first year, this didn’t feel like our home. We were renting. Now we own our home (or at least part of it), and I feel settled. I am a nester. Not in the [...]
The Morning She Was Betrayed
It was 8:35 when my alarm clock betrayed me. And I only knew of his defiance because the phone rang. Twice. But I rolled over insisting that this, too, was part of my dream. The rebellion continued until the answering machine interrupted. “Lexi?” My answering machine called. It was then that I realized that this [...]
On the Seventh Day, God Napped
by Erica Schemper And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. [...]