When I became a student pastor I had no idea what I
was getting into.
The first thing that happened after we moved into the tiny parsonage was that Johnny Johnson
died.
Almost but not quite as wonderful as a week at the ocean with 11 grandchildren is the day they all depart, leaving us suddenly alone. Then serious reading begins.
A visit with Argentinan Pentecostal pastors left me grateful that the Spirit
can use a variety of traditions—some orderly and some wonderfully
disorderly—for the growth of the kingdom.
Christians need to support the cause of a Palestinian state that
will live peacefully beside Israel—and at the same
time reach out to our Jewish neighbors in
friendship and love and shared commitment to the common good.
For Jesus, unity among his disciples is an instrument of the evangel itself. Presbyterians
have a great evangelical opportunity to show a fractured world that it
is possible for people to disagree and yet remain in
fellowship.
When the great theologian Karl Barth was charged with being a
universalist, he reportedly denied it, but then quoted 1 John: "Christ
died for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the
whole world."
Martin Marty laments the moment when you realize you are not going to read all the books you hoped and planned to read—and you will have to depend on what others are saying about books you will not get around to reading.
On Ash Wednesday, Illinois governor Pat Quinn signed a bill banning capital punishment. A member of my congregation offers a powerful Lenten lesson for the year the death penalty was abolished in Illinois.
When I was six weeks into my student pastorate, I had been to exactly one funeral—when I was seven years old. But suddenly Johnny
Johnson died, I was a pastor, and Pearl Johnson collapsed in my arms.
"Are we witnessing the death of America's denominations?" asks Russell D. Moore, pointing out that people tend to choose a church based mostly on the nursery or the music. This is not new information.
Amy Frykholm's article "Double belonging" took me back to my first encounter with double belonging. A young man in my congregation returned from working with the Peace Corps in Vietnam. He made an appointment to see me.
In the late 1970s a colleague handed me a copy of Douglas John Hall's Lighten Our Darkness: Towards an Indigenous Theology of the Cross. "I think you'll like this," she said.
