Practicing Our Faith: Saying Yes and Saying No
As Baptist pastor Kyle Childress tells the story: “I was ordained over 30 years ago by a small, rural Texas Baptist church who had called me as their new youn...
Keep Church Weird
As one local journalist noted, it was the phrase that launched a thousand bumper stickers. Tossed off by Austin Community College’s librarian, Red Wassenich, ...
The Next 100
An old preacher named Ernest Fitzgerald used to tell stories of the wonderful and colorful people he met when serving a little mountain church way back in the h...
The Gardener Indeed
As the story goes, in the days when the Czar ruled over Russia, he was walking in his palace garden one day. In the far corner of the garden he found a soldier ...
A City, Displaced
Lawyer and theologian William Stringfellow once said that “Christians go to church on Palm Sunday because they love a parade.”1 As I read one pastor said in...
Fully Alive
Ten years ago this summer, Josh, Liam, Annabelle, and I loaded up our cars and headed southeast to plant our lives with you, right here in Winston-Salem. But be...
How Will I Know? By the Meal
How will I know? How will I know? How will I know that the worst thing isn’t the last thing? How will I know that beginnings are possible when all I see are e...
Looking for the Living
About a half a dozen years ago on the Wednesday night before Easter, my family was leaving the church house with bags full of Easter goodies for our kids. My da...
We Have This Treasure
There once lived a water carrier. Every morning, as soon as the sun rose, she walked from her home to collect water in two earthen pots that hung from a long po...
Bread and Circuses
About this time last year, a viral trend caught fire on the social media site, TikTok....
Defying Norms: Prioritizing Humanity
John Buchanan, the great pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, one told a story about his best instruction in sabbath-keeping: “My instructor in Sa...
Here & There & Everywhere
I had a bit of a chuckle when picking the title for today’s Easter sermon, thinking that perhaps half of you would hear “here and there and everywhere” an...
The Resurrection Way of Life
Over the past month or so, I’ve noticed an increase in the number of stories in our news and social media that reflect on the three covid-era years we’ve co...