Senior Writer’s Block

I’ve heard plenty of pastors say they’re “not comfortable” preaching from the Old Testament (OT). And some will say they rarely preach from the OT texts, usually with a highbrow tone that implies, “I am one of the enlightened ones; only publicans still preach from that dusty, arcane, irrelevant and hopelessly out-of-touch body of work.”…

Christmas Eve is almost here, but we know it’s been on your mind for a while. You started planning sometime in September or October, psyching yourself up for the big night like a pro football player prepping for the Super Bowl. You ordered the manger-themed bulletin covers and decided to get a few more than…

In Homer’s Iliad, a scene depicts a footrace between Odysseus, the hero, and his rival Ajax. As the race plays out, Ajax breaks out to a big lead and it soon becomes obvious that Odysseus is going to lose. As they come down the home stretch, Odysseus does what athletes seem to have been doing…

One of my daily rituals is pulling into my favorite coffee shop first thing in the morning for a quick cup to go. It’s the kind of place that has those pump pots all lined up on the counter with exotic names and flavors aplenty, but I’m a creature of habit so I always get…

Fall is part of that time on the church calendar known as ‘common’ or ‘ordinary’ time, but if your church is like a lot of others, there’s a good chance you’re also getting ready to celebrate the most important unofficial season of the church year. I’m referring, of course, to stewardship season — the roll-out…

One of my guilty pleasures this time of year is to go home on Sunday afternoon after a long morning of services, plop down on the couch and turn on — oh, how I hate to admit this — the NASCAR race of the week. That’s right, I really do enjoy watching 30-some cars do…

With summer finally here, a lot of us preachers will be heading out on vacation … or at least we should be! That means you may have an opportunity to sit in someone else’s church and hear them preach during your time away. It’s not always an easy thing to do for those of us…

I ran across a handout that was distributed to participants in a weekend seminar dealing with issues of conflict resolution, group communication dynamics and the like. The two-page handout was an excerpt from a book written by Margaret J. Wheatley called Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (San Francisco:…

I recently had one of those days that invariably happen to those of us in ministry. You know, the kind of day that makes you wonder whether working in a salt mine would be a much more pleasant profession. It was filled with contentious meetings, building issues, a renegade committee leader, a nasty e-mail, the…

“Stem-cell research is always immoral.” “The invasion of Iraq was illegal.” Ouch. Whenever I hear such pronouncements from the pulpit, I can’t help but recoil. It’s not that I always disagree with the positions that are taken, or that I don’t think preachers should weigh in on public issues of moral concern. It’s the language…