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Why That Thing You Tell Your Pastor On Sunday Morning Might Not Get Done
1. My body got up hours before my brain. 2. For pastors, leading worship is exhausting. 3. And sometimes, so is coffee hour. 4. Maybe I’m running late because a small child crawled into bed and I had to pretend to be sleeping so that they’d get back to sleep before I get up. 5.…
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The Impractical Life
At some point we have to pick. Some pick at three. I’m a golfer. Or at seventy-three. I’m a priest. We pick a path. A life. Too often, though, we let a life pick us. [bctt tweet=”‘How will you help change the world?’” nofollow=”yes”] I always struggled with the question of what I want to be when I grow…
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Priest as Jesus?
I don’t know what those first followers did after he was gone. I know they cried, some wailed, all wondered what to do. Where to go. Who they are now. If we follow him, and these other, really smart, highly educated, super powerful leaders don’t like what our leader (is he really the Messiah?) had to say,…
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Absolution
For some churches, it’s all about sin. For others, it’s all about that grace. And for still others, there is the regular insistence that we don’t talk about one without the other. We don’t talk about Good Friday without Easter. It makes a certain sense, doesn’t it? that we so often tend to focus on the…
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The purpose of a priest
We often get this confused. The purpose of a priest is not to be Jesus for you. Or play Jesus in the front of the room or to imitate Jesus so that you can be healed. The purpose of a priest is to share the love of Jesus and teach you how to share the love…
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Why priests must learn to code
I’m generally not one to encourage business models in church: we’re generally saturated with them already. Or, more to the point, we apply them indiscriminately, with the idea that churches in general need to function more efficiently and take on a more corporate strategy. My own denomination, The Episcopal Church, did this with gusto in…
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The Next Big Thing for Christianity
Prophets The prophets of the Old Testament were gifted at knowing what was about to happen. But not so gifted at predicting the future. The difference between the two is simple to parse. Given the environment and knowledge of the world, culture, and the divine dream, they did an astounding job of knowing what would…
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I Am Not Your Father: the challenge of the postmodern priesthood
As a kid, I don’t remember my Dad being called Father Tom. That doesn’t mean there weren’t quite a few people who did. Or used the more proper Fr. Downs. Sometimes it was Pastor, Preacher, or the grammatically inappropriate Reverend. Most of my life, as I try to recall it, my Dad went by his…