Concerned about the decline of many of our congregations and the larger Church? Dismayed by smaller attendance on Sunday mornings? Worried that your children or friends don’t seem interested in their faith? Well, now there’s something you can do about it! I’m very excited to announce a...
Questions
posted by DJL
In the Gospel reading from Mark that a lot of us will hear this Sunday (Mark 9:30-37), Jesus tells his disciples a second time that he is going to Jerusalem where he will be rejected, beaten, and crucified and, three days later, be raised from the dead. As I mention in a column on Working...
St. Francis and The Work of the People
posted by DJL
On this beautiful late summer Friday (at least where I’m writing from ☺), I want to try to bring together two of my great interests: prayer, which I don’t understand but practice anyway; and video, which I think is an incredibly powerful medium for conveying the faith in an experiential, and not just cognitive, way. To do that – or at least to give a taste of doing that – I’m going to turn to a project exercised by a group of artists I greatly admire called The Work of the People. They’ve created a rather simple video based on the powerful prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi. I’ll print the words below; they also...
Petit Fours on 9/11
posted by DJL
I haven’t written about 9/11 this week. I’d thought about finding an appropriate prayer or something like that to mark the day, but didn’t. I think that’s for two reasons. First, so much is out there you wonder what you can contribute amid the flood of material. Second, I still...
Welcome to Church
posted by DJL
I’m increasingly interested in how we welcome folks to our congregations. In a world where “church” is no longer a given, where the Christian faith gets less and less of a hearing, and where fewer people grew up in a faith tradition, we need to think hard about what we’re saying, both...
Called to Shine
posted by DJL
I heard a story two weeks ago on NPR’s Weekend Edition that seemed to me to capture the Christian sense of vocation nearly perfectly. The story was about Getnet Marsha, an immigrant from Ethiopia who shines shoes in the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport in Charlotte, N.C. Except he...