As the pastor of a mid-sized congregation, South Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, on Cape Cod, I am as perplexed as most of my colleagues about how to reach out to twenty and thirty-year-olds in our community. With the exception of the children of long-time members or persons planning to get married at our […]
A Response to Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, by Christopher Smith and John Pattison In a recent conversation, a young adult noted, “I’m not interested in going to the big church down the road, with its band and big screen. It’s just like the mall. When I go to church, I […]
Reading 1: Acts 2:42-47 Reading 2: Psalm 23 Reading 3: I Peter 2:19-25 Reading 4: John 10:1-10 By Bruce G. Epperly Healthy spirituality is all-season: it embraces mind, body, spirit, and relationships; individual and community; sickness and health; contemplation and action; and abundance and scarcity. It promotes individual transformation, and points individuals toward God’s larger […]
Reading 1: Acts 2:1-4a. 36-41 Reading 2: Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19 Reading 3: I Peter 1:17-23 Reading 4: Luke 24:13-25 By Bruce G. Epperly Salvation or wholeness comes in many ways. If God has a truly personal relationship with each of us, then there is no “one size that fits all” approach to salvation on the […]
Reading 1: Acts 2:14a, 22-32 Reading 2: Psalm 16 Reading 3: Peter 1:3-9 Reading 4: John 20:19-31 By Bruce G. Epperly We can experience resurrection power in miraculous ways. We can experience divine resuscitations, breathing with Jesus, restoring spirits and communities in ways we never would have expected. I believe that mainline, progressive, and process […]
There is no getting around Easter if you belong to the Jesus movement. Jesus’ first followers were transformed by their encounters with the Risen Christ. Once fearful, they became courageous; once uncertain, they became confident in that Jesus was unique, the savior of humankind, victorious over sickness, sin, and death. The power of the resurrection […]
I read Alister McGrath’s If I Had Lunch with C.S. Lewis (now featured in the Patheos Book Club) in light of the current religious and cultural polarization of our time. The United Methodist Church is conducting trials to discipline pastors who perform same sex marriages. Religious leaders protest the showing of the film Noah because […]
A number of years ago, in the course of teaching a class in Wesley Theological Seminary’s Lay School, I discovered that virtually all my students had experience in various forms of complementary and global medicine and none of them had shared this with her or his pastor. These were not back row Christians but moderators, […]
I Samuel 16:1-13 Psalm 23 Ephesians 5:8-14 John 9:1-41 Today’s scriptures speak of light and darkness, and sight and blindness. They are metaphorical in nature, and must be understood in terms of the full humanity of persons of color and sight-impaired people. Darkness is not synonymous with evil: it is also the place of growth […]
What do you do with Good Friday and the Cross when you’ve abandoned the doctrine of substitutionary atonement and the divine necessity of Jesus’ death? Like many progressive Christians, I grew up hearing the mantras “Jesus died for our sins,” “Jesus died so that we might have eternal life and escape God’s wrath,” “Jesus paid […]