After a wonderful August away – both from the blog and, for most of the month, from home – I was struck again this past week at just how powerful beginnings are. Our kids began a new school year, our oldest beginning his high school career (yikes!). I also began a new term, whether I was ready or not. 🙂 The political conventions remind us that we are beginning – if not the political season, as we’ve been listening to campaign ads for months – at least the home stretch of the presidential race. Most of our congregations are also entertaining some new beginnings. No, it’s not the beginning of the church year – that’s Advent,...

We’re spending this week at Outlaw Ranch Lutheran Camp, located in the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota. I’ve been fortunate that over the years I’ve been invited to teach at a number of our summer church camps and always look forward to spending time with family and with friends old and new learning about and worshiping God in the beauty of God’s creation. In fact, let me say that a little more forcefully. I don’t just look forward to this time, I long for it, as I’ve come to have a tremendous appreciation for what our summer camps do for our youth and families and, indeed, for the whole church. The Lutheran Church of which...

I’m a huge fan of the Christian concept of vocation: that God calls each and all of us to serve God by serving our neighbor in whatever roles we may have. So whether you’re working or volunteering or a parent or sibling or student or friend or citizen – whatever role you have you can serve God by serving others. I’m attracted to this idea because it elevates our daily work and effort. In the middle ages, Christian lives within a spiritual hierarchy. Yes, it was good to be a mother or father or bricklayer or whatever. But it was better to be a priest and even better to be a monk, and so forth. One of the things Martin Luther protested...

It seems like the relative demise of denominations is in the air. Several significant blog posts and articles have been published recently that move forward the argument I made a few weeks ago that denominations may be on the way out, though in somewhat different directions. Before engaging those, though, I want to clarify one thing: I’m not in any sense anti-denominational. That is, I still think denominations do a lot of great work, particularly when it comes to organizing both the needs and strengths of their thousands of congregations. Which means that when it comes to everything from training leaders for the church to organizing...

If you’re at all familiar with Peter Rollins’ work, you know that he is one of the church’s more provocative writers and thinkers. Author of How (Not) to Speak of God and Insurrection: To Believe Is Human To Doubt, Divine, Pete is particularly gifted at shocking us into looking at our lives and the gospel – and especially our lives in light of the gospel! – in a new way. In this video from the great folks at Work of the People, Pete says the church reminds him a little too much of a crack house. That is, people take drugs to escape their pain – they’ve ended a relationship, didn’t get the job...