A few years ago a friend sent me a link to this video, and I’ve continued enjoying watching it from time to time. I thought of it again this week as I know how many of our congregations get “kick-started” after the summer is over and school and other activities get going again. What I like about the video is that it illustrates a number of misperceptions of church – that the people have it all together, have the answers their looking for, etc. – and invite us to imagine the opposite – that church is where you go when you don’t have it together, are searching for answers, and so on. It reminds me that although there are plenty...

This past weekend, I listened to an interview of Ian Knauer, author of The Farm: Rustic Recipes for a Year of Incredible Food. Knauer got his start in the “food business” by testing recipes for Gourmet Magazine. What was interesting was that Gourmet hired him not for what he knew about cooking, but what he didn’t know. As Knauer explains: I had not been to culinary school, which is the reason I got the job. I was an avid home cook — I loved to cook from magazines and cookbooks — but I wasn’t trained. That was important to them because they wanted someone who would cook like a home cook.   The reason that I was...