Someone said just about the nicest thing they could say to me this week when I was out on a pastoral visit . “I love having you over because we’re just talking, it’s not like you’re ‘company.’” While I am quite comfortable with my calling as a pastor, I’ve never been comfortable with being The…
Category: Pastoring
What’s the Point?
I have to confess, I’m tired. I’m tired of conversations about worship being little more than marketing pow-wows. I’m tired of discussions in which the acts of singing, preaching, prayer, and offering are projected through the lens of, “What makes us look good?” Now, the people who reduce worship discussions to audience demographics are not…
Why I Love Lent
Of all the seasons in the Church year, Lent is the one to which I’m most drawn. It’s a season of spiritual reset and reorientation, a deliberate move to be joined to the story of Jesus. While I appreciate the other seasons of the Church year, Lent is the one which absolutely refuses to make…
Drifters
I don’t have much to say on this one. Any pastor can relate to the existence of “drifters.” People in a hopeless search for a perfect community in which they don’t have to feel any tension. Unfortunately for drifters, the tension 1 we feel in community is partly how the Holy Spirit leads us into…
When sermons go, “Bleck!”
This has been a tough week for my sermon-writing. Thursday I wrote my first draft on the passage for the week and didn’t feel right about it. I chewed on it overnight and decided to re-write it on Friday, and I absolutely hated it. I felt the kind of visceral, “This must never be seen…
Reminder
We all get annoyed with people. It’s inescapable. Rather than allowing that annoyance to stoke within us a sense of superiority and arrogance, however, we should remember we are people. People get as annoyed with us as we do of “them.”
