Knowing that this Christmas would be so very different than Christmases past, and knowing that so many pastoral leaders are not only having to make difficult decisions to keep their people and communities safe but then also explain and sometimes defend those decisions, and knowing that all of us are already pressed at this time of the year, even without a global pandemic… Know all of this, Ben Ciesik and Mary Pechauer (co-lead pastors at Bethlehem Lutheran Church of the Twin Cities) and I decided to publish some resources to help us keep Christmas amid the coronavirus in ways that are joyful, faithful, and safe. The site we...

Dear Partner in Preaching, You may be tempted to read just the primary verses of this Sunday’s appointed passage – Luke 9:28-36 – and save the remainder (37-43) for another time. That’s understandable, as the two discreet scenes appear to have little to do with each other. The first, after all, is about the transfiguration, Luke’s take on the dramatic mountaintop encounter between Jesus, Moses, and Elijah while the second is a more ordinary scene of Jesus responding to human need back in the valley. Little wonder you may be thinking of focusing on the former and saving the latter for another Sunday. If this is how you’re leaning,...

I am working with some pastors in NW Iowa on preaching. They are largely from the Reformed tradition — Christian Reformed Church, The Reformed Church in America, and their various Reformed cousins — and have been meeting together for a couple of years with the help of a Lilly Endowment grant to support preachers administered by Calving Seminary‘s Center for Excellence in Preaching. Apparently they stumbled upon my book, Preaching at the Crossroads: How the World-and Our Preaching-Is Changing (cool)…and liked it (very cool)…enough to invite me to conversation (beyond cool! 🙂 ). We haven’t just talked...

Here’s the simple but just a little troubling question I’ve been wrestling with since participating in Luther Seminary’s recent Rethinking Faith Formation conference: Given how many other groups and movements legitimately lay claim to our allegiance today, can the Church ever expect to exert the level of influence in our lives that it once did? Let me explain: in medieval times the Church was everything and everywhere – involved in politics, in control of the banks, the arbiter of salvation (or damnation), the final authority on all matters of domestic and public life. The omnipresence of the Church has been declining for...