Some Thoughts On Home

I spent Monday through Wednesday of this week at a United Methodist conference in Dallas, Texas.  As a lot of you know, that's the city of my birth, childhood, and adolescence. One of the first things I did on this trip -- as I do every time on those rare occasions I...

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Up From Cynicism

Over the past several years,  I have, thankfully, emerged out of a fog of cynicism. I went through a season where I was so frustrated with the actions of people who described themselves as mature Christians that I almost threw out the notion of mature Christianity...

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Behind The Scenes, Week 2 — “Beauty And The Bleh”

So there's a beauty: Esther. And there's bleh: her life situation, her predicament, her enemies. Why have both synagogue and church always included such a sordid, "godless," story in their Scriptures?  What does Esther 2 have to say to us in 2018. Quite a lot.  It's a...

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Methodist Experiment

With some frequency, our Next Step Membership Workshop will involve an experiment. A Methodist experiment.   And while the people in the class change, the results of the experiment rarely do. Here it is.  At the beginning of our third evening together, I ask the...

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