As the waiter placed the meal on our table, my friend asked if I would offer the blessing. When I said, “Amen” my friend said “You forgot to say ‘the hands that provided it’.” I’m not sure anyone had critiqued my prayer aloud since seminary, so it took me a minute to figure out what […]
Tag Archives: faith
There are just two books in the Bible named after women: Ruth and Esther. I wish the church had better saved the Easter experiences of Mary, Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, a preacher Matthew calls “the other Mary” (Matthew 28 & Luke 24) The church gave us a book called Timothy, but not […]
In her beautifully written book, “In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women, Faith and the Stories We Inherit” Yolanda Pearce, narrates her journey from growing up in a storefront black holiness pentecostal church in New York City to becoming the Dean of the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, guided along the way by “Grandmother Theology”. Pierce […]
My mother, a fourth grade teacher and Senior High Sunday School Teacher, upheld language rules. When I was in middle school, one of dad‘s younger brothers came to visit and cursed at the table. Mom joked about needing to wash out his mouth with soap. Uncle Dave, feeling himself, smiled and repeated the foul word […]
I was 11 years old and my church league basketball team was playing Immanuel Baptist. Immanuel had this tall kid, Big 33, who I was supposed to guard. We couldn’t stop him. Between the quarters, our coach, let’s call him Coach Rupp, pulled me to the side and laid out a detailed plan that involved […]
What has nourished you? What has carried you to this place where you now stand? If I was to think of a symbol of what fed me as a child, I could place a mason jar of homegrown green beans on the altar. Every summer, we picked bushel baskets of beans at the family farm, […]
Last weekend, I joined our confirmation retreat along with 14 seventh and eighth graders. Our teens asked great questions like “why is our denomination splitting up?” I felt drawn to the whiteboard and with help from Faith Friend Dr. Michael Stephens I drew a timeline of church splits: Christianity from Judaism 45AD, Roman Catholic […]
Sometimes you’ll pick up a scholarly article or a legal contract and it will begin with a glossary defining unfamiliar words or technical terms. Some words like love or hate may be used so widely that knowing just what someone means when they say “I love that” is not that clear. If you tried to […]
Last Tuesday, after what we church workers call Easter Monday, I looked at my sermon text and I wondered why I laid out a sermon series rooted in First John. Unlike most of the Bible, First John does not tell a story, at least not in a traditional sense with a storyline, plot, and characters. […]
Last Wednesday, Hunter, Sol, Mercede and I worked on building an irrigation path to divert groundwater away from a home and towards a catch basin. There was not a nice stack of matching concrete pavers from Home Depot but instead a pile of preindustrial stones collected from nearby fields. Each rock had its own size, […]
pastorpaulpurdue 