• Church

    Church

    When I speak about “church” I speak about all the faithful Christians in the world trapped in the mind-numbing semantics of their denominational pigsties AND those constellations of congregations who refuse to be part of anything bigger or play denominational politics or play nicely with others AND those free agents running around all by themselves…

  • Music

    Music

    I was raised on Peter, Paul, and Mary and Pete Seeger. We listened to show tunes and the Beatles. Total Boomer parents. A flower child’s child. And the culture outside our house was the last hurrah of Top-40 radio: the era when everybody really did hear the same songs on the radio. Before the whole…

  • Entrance

    Entrance

    How do we enter into church? The building, the people, the concept… How do we come in? Do we walk…stroll…shimmy? Do we slink in and sit in the back? Stride to the front? Get lost in the middle? Do we seek out the familiar pew in the familiar space? Is it the same community of…

  • One example of how the Bible is political

    One example of how the Bible is political

    Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us; look, and see our disgrace! Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens. We have become orphans, fatherless; our mothers are like widows. We must pay for the water we drink; the wood we get must be bought. With a yoke on our necks…

  • How to start deconstructing church

    How to start deconstructing church

    I want to help make the church better. Seriously better. Like the kind of thing where everybody feels like there is a place for them. Where everybody is connected and a full participant. I also want to help make church even more like GOD wants it to be and less like we’ve come to expect it to…

  • Embody faith

    We must read this in the context of Jesus teaching about the children. About the poor, the disadvantaged, the disempowered, those stripped of full humanity and equality in the world. The physical, living faith of following Jesus Proper 21B  |  Mark 9:38-50 Following Jesus The big theme of the last two weeks continues: identity. Jesus’s…

  • Someone untimely born

    Someone untimely born

    Toward the end of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, he wrote something that sounds a lot like this: I’ve given you something really, really important, maybe the most important thing that I’ve learned: Christ died because we sin. He was buried. Two days later he was brought to life like it says in our Hebrew…