Miguel Angel Nuñez, in a post on Facebook, discusses what he would like to see in a church. Here’s an extract: Deseo formar parte de una comunidad cristiana que base su relación en la igualdad y no en la jerarquía, en la sinceridad y no en medias verdades, en la intimidad y no en un…
I want to thank UM Insight for publishing a post from this blog, Defensive Christianity. It’s encouraging to have a post recognized and republished, and I appreciate what they do for the United Methodist Church.
There have been a number of posts around the web regarding the decline of liberal Christianity. It got started by Ross Douthat in the New York Times. There have been a number of good responses, including Rachel Held Evans (which connected best with me), Chaplain Mike, and Diana Butler Bass. All these responses are good….
No, I don’t mean this in the very literal sense, but either in the spiritual sense or in terms of affiliation. One of the defining experiences of my life involves crossing the street in this sense. I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist. That involves quite a number of things, including keeping the Sabbath (Saturday)…
Dave Black warns us today against the cult of the speaker. (With permission I’ve extracted the relevant portion as a post at JesusParadigm.com since Dave’s blog doesn’t allow linking to a specific post.) Considering what we’ve heard recently about megachurches creating satellite campuses that receive the message from the senior pastor on the main campus…
As an ex-SDA who is now Methodist, I just have to share this video: Now my experience amongst Methodists is that most will just shrug their shoulders about worship on Saturday. They get a little more tense about soul sleep. I have encountered a few Methodists who are like the one in the video,…
I have made a few negative comments about conference dashboards keeping statistics on membership, apportionments, and other activities available to anyone who wants to read. I continue to question whether these numbers really tell the story of the health of the churches. There are, I believe, some very large and growing churches that have little…
There are many days when the United Methodist Church discourages me, and I wrote a post yesterday with that sort of feeling. But there are two things that regularly encourage me: Encountering vital small congregations, and meeting some of our young pastors. Via another young pastor, Geoffrey Lentz, who is doing wonderful things at First…
Yes, that’s a big collection of topics, but I think they’re connected. John Meunier links to an excellent post by Dan Dick, which you should read before you read this one. The topic here is the conference dashboards in United Methodist annual conferences, such as this one for the North Alabama Conference. I do have…
Jason Byassee explains why he voted to allow up to 2/3 of seminary credits to be taken online in his United Methodist conference (HT: Joel Watts). Readers of this blog will already be aware that I believe it’s inevitable that the majority of education is delivered by virtual means. Not only that, I think this…
