For two weeks at the end of May six students and I walked the path of St. Francis from Assisi to Rome. Our guide, Alessandro, was honest: "We don't know exactly which route Francis took, so in the spirit of…

It was an unusual Easter sermon, to say the least. At least unusual for this well-trained CRC boy. We were worshiping at Christ Church in the old center of Philadelphia, a venerable Episcopal parish founded in 1695 and claiming all…

Note: If a film in which two socially awkward men make up paddleball games, do jigsaw puzzles, watch kung-fu movies, and face a terminal diagnosis, appeals to you, then bookmark this post, go watch the movie, Paddleton, on Netflix, and…

The megachurch phenomenon is fraught with challenges and questions.  Increasingly we are also seeing not just one huge congregation that worships in a single cavernous space but churches with multiple campuses—sometimes over a dozen or so—where people gather and see…

For most of my life I was a Baptist; specifically a Missionary Baptist in the African American tradition of what that means. In that tradition, we never observed Pentecost Sunday. The African American Baptist liturgical calendar consisted of Christmas Day,…

Good news, bad news. The good news is that tomorrow is Pentecost, so we get to sing Spirit-centric songs and think about exciting things like rushing wind, tongues of flame, and sudden outbreaks of multilingualism. The bad news is that…

“We are the same person,” is the thing I find myself saying when I feel a particular affinity to someone. The other day my friend confessed that when she got really overwhelmed at work, she would start researching #vanlife and…

Last week I was gifted the library of a local, retired pastor. Rather than donate the books to a bookstore, he wanted them to go to a young pastor he could meet personally. I was touched that he and his…