Crowded Tables
As the Brandi Carlile song goes, “I want a house with a crowded table, And a place by the fire for everyone.” This was exactly the spirit ...
A Banner Celebration!
Dear Beloved Community, The next time you come to the church house, swing by the front of the building – new 100th anniversary front column banners are up! Th...
Bold and Boundless Love
Three years ago I worked up the courage to attend my first Pride celebration. I wasn’t necessarily nervous about attending so much as before then I’d never ...
Finishing with a Flourish
Dear Beloved Community, I hope you’ve had a chance to read the email reminder about Sunday’s Called Church Conference. In it, you read of the motions to be ...
Sacramental Thresholds
Do you remember your graduations? Your threshold moments? Your times of transition? Closing one chapter and beginning a new one? That weird liminal space in bet...
Jesus Still Shows Up
On the weekend after Easter many of us gathered at Morrow Mountain State Park for our first church camping weekend. This event was sponsored by the Adult Minist...
Risen and Power-Full Indeed!
Dear Beloved Community, With each passing year of our living, one truth never fades – God is always, always at work making all things new, surprising us again...
What “Clearing Out” is For
Dear Beloved Community, This Lenten season of “clearing out” has been clarifying, hasn’t it? We’ve felt it in our church house, as the first floor has, ...
A Week Called Holy
I doubt that those first disciples would have used the word “holy” to describe the final week of Jesus’ earthly life. In seven brief days the disciples ex...
Signs of New Life
As we begin the month of April, new life is emerging all around us. Our physical world is teeming with new signs of life. Tree leaves. Flowers. Birdsong. Buzzin...
Free and Faithful
As you are reading this, many First on Fifth folks are in Charlotte for the annual gathering of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina. Last...
Spring, she’s coming!
Dear Beloved Community, Just last week, our family spent a couple of nights in Western North Carolina – a little Spring Break getaway if you will. Josh and I ...
A Season of Change
Lent is a season of change, a season of transition. Falling during the seasonal transition from winter to spring, Lent reminds us that new life is near. How wil...
The Long Road
Dear Beloved Community, As I’m writing to you today, I’m flanked with the dearest of friends around me. It’s time for my annual peer learning group retrea...
100th Anniversary Hymnal!
The Apostle Paul instructed the Colossian church that they should “with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.” And ...
The Conviction at the Epicenter of Christian Life
Dear Beloved Community, Over the past two weeks, many of you have reached out to the church as questions have arisen about the impact of recent changes in our c...
Finding Belonging
“Do you have siblings?” “Have you been to the beach in the past year?” “Are you a preacher’s kid?” “Have you ever lived overseas?” “Do you e...
Finding the Good Life 2025
Happy new year, Beloved Community! I write this new year’s note to you still in the wiles of 2024, in those final days before we meet the babe in a manger. As...
The Clutch of Light
Dear Beloved Community, Most every year, we mark the third Sunday of Advent with our service of Lessons & Carols. Fitting on Joy Sunday, right? Our Sanctuar...
O Happy Sin
This Sunday in worship we will continue a tradition begun in 1918 at Kings College in Cambridge, England – – a Service of Lessons and Carols. Our Sanctuary ...
Signs of Life (Together)
Dear Beloved Community, Around the staff meeting table yesterday, we marveled at how many of you came, excited, to our kickoff gathering at 9:00am on Sunday as ...
The Little Patch of Land We Tend
Dear Beloved Community, In his recent Christian Century article called “What’s special about a church building?,” Brian Bantum writes this:...
Holy Gatherings
Hello First on Fifth Friends! I recently came across two headlines that gave me pause: “Is this the end of the dining room as we know it?” and “The Death...
A Big Week For Belonging
Dear Beloved Community, Belonging had a big week around First on Fifth. We belonged with a bunch of Baptists over in Greensboro, as our Cooperative Baptist Fell...
Summer Reading List
Dear Beloved Community, Every so often, I use this space in the newsletter to share with you some recent, non-churchy books I’ve read and loved, or podcasts ...
So Much Good Happening Here!
Dear Beloved Community, If you have felt like this month has been full to the brim with wonderful staff news, I have even more wonderful staff news to share –...
The Gifts of a Teaching and Learning Church
Dear Beloved Community, One August Sunday some three years ago, I met a winsome pair of brand-new students on the precipice of beginning a three-year journey t...
The Growing Season
If the pollen count tells us anything, it’s that spring is springing! These April weeks are dazzling, aren’t they? The cherry blossoms and tulips lead the w...
Calling Her a Midwife
Dear Beloved Community, Together with BWIM and our friends at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina and Baptist Women in Ministry of North Caroli...
All Things New
Dear Beloved Community, Several days have since passed, but the deep and abiding love I experienced alongside you this Holy Week and Easter will not soon abate....
Collecting Our Tears
In author Sarah Bessey’s new book, Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith, she speaks of the wilderness of lament. Far too often, she...
Bold Witness and Stories of Resurrection
Yesterday morning, I gathered with over 150 folks for an optional workshop at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina’s Annual Gathering. Called ...
Bearing the Beams of Love
I’ve gotten into the habit of wearing a rough-hewn wooden cross every day during Lent. The cross necklace was a gift from my former church, Highland Baptis...
Facing Our Finitude
I admit, I had to laugh. It’s precisely not the moment to laugh, this somber ritual in worship where the ministers smudge ashes on the brows of their congr...
Connections and Calling
Dear Beloved Community, I write to you from a cool morning in the mountains of western North Carolina, where I have joined nearly 130 other ministers (including...
The Realm of Possibility
In these weekly letters, I often enjoy the opportunity to write reflectively for you about a happening in the life of the church, or the chance to tell a meanin...
The Ministry of a Deacon
Tomorrow in worship, we install 24 active Deacons who have committed to serve God and our church in 2024. Five of these eight Deacons newly-called to serve are ...
A Pastor Installed
Perhaps there are few more meaningful services of worship for a pastor than that of an installation service that makes official the binding of a pastor to their...
The Word that Rings Deep and True
“What was your star word?,” Cyrus whispered to Pat as they walked back to their seats. “Quiet!,” she responded with a chuckle. “Well that’s approp...
Tender Care
December's whirlwind of presents and parties and performances and places to go are always peppered with complexity. You know them well, I'm sure. "Oh what fun t...
2023 Year in Review
On this final day of 2023, I find myself awash in reflections and gratitude from the year we've shared together. For what a season it’s been, our joy made ful...
Gift and Giver
If I had a dollar for every one of you who've shared with such gratitude what Sunday's service of Lessons & Carols meant to you... well, I'd have a host of doll...
How to Unlock the Heart
I’m certain that music unlocks a chamber of the human heart in each of us where words cannot. Time and time again in my life, this has been true for me, and p...
Now and Not Yet
All of us who enjoyed time together this week in Mary Foskett’s “More than a Season: Advent and the Christian Life” class were given ample gifts. Not the ...
To Dwell Among Us
I’ve had a recent conversation with one of my children about Santa, the mystery that stirs the imagination about a man who circles the earth in a night, nary ...
Love Multiplies
Happy belated Thanksgiving to you, dear ones! No matter what filled your table or who filled your home, I hope your time of fellowship and gratitude this week w...
The Warmth of Zack’s Blessing
I can hardly consider ordinations without feeling the invitation to consider blessing. My own ordination nearly 15 years ago was one of such affirmation, that t...
November’s Quiet Bounty
Just a couple of nights ago, my family and I drove into Ardmore (our usual Halloween haunt) for some trick-or-treating. All five of us were dressed and ready fo...
To Gather Together Again
Perhaps you know I have a certain fondness for reunions. I call it a function of being a preacher’s kid whose family put down deep roots wherever we lived,...
An Ordinary Church Business Meeting
I never thought I'd hold such a fondness in my heart for an ordinary church business meeting until the pandemic pressed these onto a screen for years....
Sighs Too Deep for Words
On weeks like this one, even for those like me who work with words and Word, I come up wordless in the face of such horrors like those we've watched unfold in I...
40th Anniversary Celebration of Baptist Women in Ministry
I've returned from a week away, shared with our larger Baptist family and First on Fifth denominational partners, and what a gift it was! I, along with our Amy ...
Welcoming Our New Members
Perhaps you have noticed that we have some new members around here. And not just some – to date, we have welcomed 59 new members into the beloved community of...
151st Anniversary
September 22 is an auspicious day in the life of our church, for it was 151 years ago that our foremothers and fathers gathered to make official what long had b...
The Beauty of Music-Making
I came of age as a singer under the direction of musicians who were themselves students and supporters of the famed conductor, Robert Shaw. ...
The Way Back Home
While I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the collection of years (20?!) since I was a college student, making reunion weekend plans with my old pals has me...
Tending the Roots
As I have attempted to become a half-decent plant parent over these adulting years, I figured that in order to shed my “accidentally kill all the plants that ...
The Connective Tissue of Blessing
Last summer while Josh and I were in Spain en route to our Camino de Santiago starting point, we were stuck in the middle of a long day of travel in our longest...
Every Accomplishment is Rooted in a Practice
Thanks in part to the generosity of Amy Mac and Roper who shared with me a bounty of tomatoes from this week’s older adult tomato pick up, I decided that a sa...
“Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.”
Several years ago, when I began contemplating what would “make my heart sing,” in the words of the National Clergy Renewal Program’s sabbatical applicatio...
Gratitude Tethers
When the dear old dad of my oldest friend Anna gave me a hard time last week for turning the ripe old age of 42 -- "that sure sounds like an age when you'd know...
Sabbath Sojourn
Caught in the full and boisterous stretch of weeks that included our church's first time at the Pride Festival, Abigail Cook's final Sunday on our staff, the an...
The Special Magic of Camp
As a young person, a week away at church camp has the power to transform. And when that week is spent at Passport, anything is possible!...
Healing from Theological Trauma
There are but a handful of countless stories I've heard in my years of ministry about the trauma that has afflicted far too many Christians -- some even within ...
Holy Ambition: CBF’s General Assembly
This week, twenty First on Fifth folks traveled to Atlanta for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship's General Assembly, the annual gathering of more than 1000 Coo...
A Walk in Honor of Generations of Queer Folk
Nineteen years ago this month, I attended my first ever Pride Festival. I was living in Chicago at the time, and many of my new friends in our Master of Music p...
“PREACH!”
Baptists have been in the news this week; perhaps you’ve heard. The Southern Baptist Convention met for their annual gathering, and beyond any other headline ...
Welcome to Summer!
My family toasted the end of the school year and beginning of the summer with several days away camping this week. (Which is why this email is a bit delayed too...
Giving Thanks for Abigail Cook
About this time two years ago, Kim Towles pulled me aside after worship to make sure I saw the family that was visiting and happened to sit alongside her and Ch...
A Look Back on Pentecost Sunday
On Sunday, we’ll slip into the pews, sing the hymns of faith and tell the stories of Jesus, hear Word proclaimed and good news shared. Expected, you might say...
Indeed, How Can We Keep From Singing?
“Ok everyone, call out your favorites!”...
The Complicated Feelings of May
“I just want you to remind yourself,” she says rather cheekily, “you could run marathons; you could climb Mount Everest; because you have figured out how ...
Staff Updates this May
I write with several staff bits of news for you today!...