ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS October 2, 2025 Last Sunday, I talked about how we continue to grow as a church, but how our growth will occur by us intentionally getting smaller. At first, it sounds counterintuitive, if not outright nonsense. It’s one thing if growth by itself is the goal. If we were trying to generate numbers alone, then bigger at any cost would be the driving and blinding force.
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS October 1, 2025 It is the first of October, and being the old curmudgeon that I am, I find myself wondering where the year has gone. There were so many tasks I wanted to accomplish this year, and now I only have a quarter of the year to get everything accomplished that is currently waiting to be finished… and, of course, the stuff that has yet
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 30, 2025 As many of you may have heard and some of you might have smelled, we had a little electrical fire at the church on Saturday. I don’t want to be dismissive of what occurred, but I am thankful I had a small wedding in the chapel; otherwise, no one would have been at the church on Saturday. We might have created a whole
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 29, 2025 Prayer for the Week: Could it be that we were created for something important? Could it be that we have been called for something impactful? Could it be that you, Most Generous and Amazing God, have been shaping us, teaching us, preparing us
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 28, 2025 So yesterday, I officiated a little wedding in the chapel—a lovely young couple. About 20 minutes before the wedding started, I got two rather large splinters from a piece of wood, right on the end of my left index finger, including one of them going under my fingernail. I was able to quickly pull out the one under the fingernail, but the other
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 27, 2025 Tomorrow, we will begin a five-week journey of casting a vision of where we are going as a church, using one of our Core Values each week as a sort of jumping-off place. And yes, I am using a space metaphor for going somewhere; the implication, of course, is that we are going somewhere we’ve never been before. Because the Gospel is always
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 26, 2025 I was recently reminded of a Tony Campolo quote that I’ve loved. Tony once famously said, “Mixing religion and politics is like mixing ice cream and horse manure. It doesn’t hurt the manure, but it ruins the ice cream.” Ruin is probably an understatement, and my concern is that the mix of religion and politics right now is making a stinky mess of
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 25, 2025 Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.” Those words have been rattling around inside of me for a few weeks. I’m not sure if I’d use them in my sermon this week or not. Yet I find myself agreeing with the words and then adding a caveat, a reason to sort of disagree.
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 24, 2025 So, if you are reading this, then it means you were not taken away to heaven yesterday. Of course, there is always the possibility that folks can continue to receive email and peruse social media after being snatched from this world and taken into the clouds. Whatever the case, I have not heard of planes crashing to the ground because pilots were raptured,
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 23, 2025 What happens when something that seemed so far away from your family context, something so outside what you believed could impact you directly, ends up on your doorstep? It might be a frightening diagnosis, betrayal, change in relationship, addition to the family, death, layoff, or mental health crisis. There are those crises that were a long time in the making, something we could