Early Sunday morning, I tweeted out these words:Discovering that the less Methodist a #umc church looks, the more Wesleyan it becomes.A number of my friends in the Twitterverse asked me to "explain" or "unpack" or "elaborate" . . . none of which are you really able to...
Oh, c'mon Jesus. "Hate your father and mother"?!Why would you use such inflammatory language?And why would a church EVER choose to use such a reading as the basis of its message on Father's Day?And what in the world could any of this have to do with my living...
You're all familiar with how political cartoonists create caricatures of our presidents. Caricatures have a way of emphasizing the part and thereby obscuring the whole.For example, in the hands of political cartoonists, Richard Nixon became little more than a...
A friend and I have been reading the book of Ephesians together.For over a year.We go down a lot of rabbit trails during our time together, but when we zero in on Ephesians, the rewards are rich indeed.Spending that much time on that short a book, however, also raises...
Don't most of us go through a phase of wanting to be someone else when we grow up?Or at least just like someone else when we grow up.Sometimes they are called role models and other times they are inspirations.Whatever you call them, here are five different men who, at...
A couple of 22-year-old kids got married on a 100 degree day in a steaming gothic cathedral located in the center of a college campus in New Jersey.We didn't know anything about anything.Sometimes, we still don't.But every once in awhile, we do. Maybe...
Jesus said what?Well, he said all kinds of things. Many of them comforting, like “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” and “I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”But other times, what Jesus said was . . . well . . ....
Every time my wife travels to and works for a few days in Dallas, the city where I grew up, I think of this song by Brooks & Dunn:I didn't grow up on red dirt road.But I have enough memories and nostalgia to realize that it has life on both ends.
If you were there, you know how the Baptism Celebration pulsated with joy and euphoria.If you weren't there . . . well, we're going to do it again.And here's what it looked like:First of all, we had about 200 people show up, some (55) to be baptized, others to...
More than any other major rock band, Aerosmith owes its success to hip hop music.Huh?After a stellar run in the late 70s, Aerosmith limped into the 1980s boozed up, drugged out, and on rock & roll life support. Then in 1986, Run-DMC did a remake of Walk This...