Jack and Jesus

When I think of seminary, some of my favorite memories have to do with my three closest classmates and I having a drink together at The Pub. The Pub was technically a gastropub, meaning they have a huge high-end beer menu and a slightly smaller, but quality food menu. You could get beers from all

Life Together IV: Serving Together

Building the Band First United Methodist Church, Thomaston (GA) was my first full-time position as a minister, a county seat church in Central Georgia. It was like a lot of older, established churches back east in that the church had been doing things pretty much the same way for about fifty years. Not that they

Hermeneutics and Schism

    In November of 2009, I became a United Methodist. My wife and I had been members of Southern Baptist Churches for most of our faith lives and had spent most of that time trying to figure out why we didn’t fit in. I had a conversation one day with Kevin Lobello, pastor at

Life Together: Renewal

Sanity Sick Days The year or so before I left the corporate world for the ministry, I was emotionally just this side of a frazzled mess. When I began the transition in earnest, it was a relief to step away from the working world as I knew it. For three years, I had been working

The Lost Art of Discourse

On the way into the office this morning, I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR. The host was trying to interview a member of Congress regarding the current state of several political issues, notably DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program). The bias was evident and expected, the congressman

Escaping Politics

  I live in a red state. When I say a red state, I mean that during the presidential election in 2016 when the polls closed at 7:00 pm local time, the pundits and talking heads on the various cable news networks immediately declared it won for the current president before there was even one

Life Together II: Learning Together

    The Hard Way[1] Justin Welby may not be a name you are familiar with, but if you can see your life as a series of obstacles and hurdles to overcome, you will relate. His father was an erratic man, prone to rash decisions and illicit behavior, something that would lead to divorce when

Life Together I: Community

Moving day Moving is always a troublesome, headache of a chore. I should know, I’ve moved from Georgia to Kentucky to Colorado to Wyoming over a span of five years. For those who may be curious, that is a total of two thousand and five miles across seven states, lugging a family’s worth of stuff