Overstatement

Better Said

Jim Perry’s commentary, distributed by UMNS, does a great job or articulating some of my concerns about abandoning the guaranteed appointment in the United Methodist Church. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it.

Guaranteed Appointments

In this life there are few guarantees. The old joke says the only two things for sure in this life are death and taxes. Used to be, if you were a United Methodist pastor, you could add “an appointment” to that list. For quite a while, the United Methodist Church has promised it’s fully ordained [...]

God’s Initiative

If revelation is to come to human beings, they need to be changed entirely. Faith itself must be created in them. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Act and Being We are what we are because of God’s initiative, not our own. I suppose this idea is fundamentally the problem some have with evolution. How can we [...]

Prayer and Service

Service and prayer can never be separated; they are related to each other as the Yin and Yang of the Japanese Circle. – Henri Nouwen in The Living Reminder When we prayer, we serve. When we serve, we pray. Our actions are simply our prayers given flesh. I often marvel at the insistence that we [...]

The Center

Today, with ashes on my head and a heaviness in my heart… Christ is the center. That is the affirmation of my faith. Not that I put Christ at the center of my life. Rather, God reveals Christ to me as the center of everything. And that is all I have, ultimately, to bet my [...]

A New Model for Discipleship

What would a new model for discipleship look like? Well, a new model would of course be faithful to the oldest model – that utilized by Jesus and his disciples. Here are some elements of a new/old model for discipleship that migh be helpful for us in the old-line church to consider: 1. Discipleship is [...]

Figuring out discipleship

Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” - Luke 5: 10b I wonder what happened to that idea. Somewhere along the way, the church stopped catching people. Or, I should say, the mainline protestant church in America stopped catching people. The mission of the church, [...]

Church libraries…

Few places have collected more dust in recent years than that attic at the parsonage and the church library. This is true of my parsonage attic and our church library, but is also practically universally true of all parsonages and libraries. Dan Dick recently reflected on this reality across Methodism, and his thoughts inspired me to think [...]

Social Justice?

“Social justice” is one of those buzz words that we preachers give a lot of credence too. Almost all of us look up to the great champions of social justice throughout history, from Martin Luther to his namesake King. I too have a long-standing interest in social justice going back to my seminary training and [...]

Wrong

The death penalty is wrong. It is wrong simply because it is wrong to kill someone. It is wrong because it doesn’t deter violent crime. It is wrong because it doesn’t alleviate a victim’s grief or loss. And it’s wrong because this can happen: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/opinion/01herbert.html?ref=todayspaper

Health Care: Off Track

I remain dismayed at the current state of the health care reform debate. I was particularly dismayed this morning while listening to an NPR report on Morning Edition. I realize that the report is covering the fringe, and not the mainstream. But I also realize that it is the fringe that has gotten this debate off track. There is [...]

Discerning my call

Exploration is a United Methodist event designed to help young people discern their call to ministry. A recent spate of bloggers posted their own personal stories of their calling, as a way of celebrating and supporting Exploration 2009, set for November. I thought I would join the effort. Looking back now, after about 10 years [...]

I just discovered Posterous

Recently, I reevaluated my blogging patterns. Frankly, I was tired of having a blog but not really running a blog. I have come to believe that blog is a verb. And if you don’t keep at it and update it relatively frequently, at some point it is no longer a blog…it just blah. So, I was trying [...]

Blogging: What little I’ve learned

I’ve had this blog (overstatement.org) for several years now. Though I have not been a very dedicated blogger, I have learned a few valuable lessons that might be helpful to both of you who read this blog. If you are a pastor, chances are good that you have wondered if you should blog as well. [...]