When I think of my own childhood, I remember playing barefooted in the backyard with my sisters. I remember planting pumpkin seeds beneath our jungle gym, that eventually grew into […]
It is a little before 5:00 on a Wednesday morning, and I am driving through the dark streets of West Hartford, Connecticut. There are very few cars on the road–few […]
What did you want to be when you grow up? I don’t know about you all, but I was certain that I was going to be an agricultural veterinarian. I […]
Q: What do you do when life gives you lemons? A: You make s’mores. For about a month, we smelled natural gas outside the sanctuary doors. But as it often […]
“All of the fun, none of the work.” It’s the phrase I frequently hear from clergy when I tell them that I’m an Associate Rector. It’s the “truth-in-jest” description of […]
Like many good ministry ideas, this one came about by accident. I interned at two small, rural churches during my second year in seminary. At one of the churches – […]
Unlike Carol Howard Merritt, I grew up in a small, progressive American Baptist congregation. In my church life, I grew up in a place that invited questions, encouraged me to […]
There’s a story, a myth perhaps, about a congregation that stopped all activities during Lent. That season they gathered for Sunday worship, and then the pastor and elders visited the […]
In Seminary, a professor had a “Dead Church Swear Jar.” If we said local congregations, denominations, or the Church universal was dying or dead, we had to put money in […]
Growing up, church was… interminably slow. Not bad, just slow. Like the waving of a cardboard fan in the hands of a church mother, it was steady and sure, and […]
