Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell

“A good sermon should skate right up to the edge of heresy. Make your point to the extreme. You’ll have other sermons to pull in the other direction. Dare to go out on the thin ice. You’ll hear some cracks…

I met Paul Boardman over 30 years ago, when we were both seminarians. The son of Navigator missionaries to Japan, and an alum of Calvin College (where often people mistakenly called him “Borgman”), he approached me one day and said,…

I would consider myself a Bruce Springsteen fan, not a devotee. Bruce and I were close back in the day. His Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town were staples on my turntable. Maybe a decade later…

Happy New Year! That probably makes it a bit late for resolutions. Honestly, I have mixed feelings about them anyway. The whole idea of New Year’s resolutions is a subset of a larger, theoretical discussion of which I never tire.…

It's worth a smile or two to realize how human it is, right now—a couple new inches of snow on the fields just outside my window, our furnace running us bankrupt, the temps barely enough to move the mercury, darkness…

Jesus is an apocalyptic figure. Christianity is an apocalyptic religion. Advent is an apocalyptic season. This is very hard. Apocalyptic means revealing, disclosure, unveiling. What has been hidden is brought to light. A great reversal is coming—swiftly, shockingly, out of…

“My father sat on that chair every morning to put on his socks and shoes.” So said the elderly gentleman, a member of my congregation for decades before I arrived on the scene. He and his wife were emptying their…

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the phrase. In a backyard Bible school. Yes, that was a thing for a while, holding Vacation Bible School in neighborhood backyards. Some sort of outreach emphasis, I suppose. “Everyone…

I was in the room where it happened, to borrow from Hamilton-speak. The room where The Twelve was hatched. A quaint retreat center where the board of Perspectives was gathered, discussing how to use the web to engage more quickly…

The third-annual collection of bits, pieces, and trivia. I hope you find a couple that are interesting, or at least one that is annoying. 1.) I read that pagan, pre-Christian religions are making a bit of a comeback in some…