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The Good Book
Reading the Bible can be one of our most baffling, inspiring, frustrating, even dull, endeavors. How many of us love literature and even so find the Bible opaque and, at times, strangely irrelevant? And yet some of our most irritating conversation partners seem to find the text intimately…
continue reading…What Good is Church?
A dear friend and mentor of mine, Keith Torney, (a UCC pastor who served several local congregations so ably before his untimely death while on a hike in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains, age 64) once wrote in his church newsletter,
“I have learned a lot in these past 37 years. But the one…
continue reading…Being Church
In the 1950s, Americans relocated all over the country and settled down in newly built homes in newly developed neighborhoods. Our economy boomed and the babies boomed with it. The generation who came of age during the ‘40s and ‘50s often remember that time of unprecedented growth and…
continue reading…What Good is Church?
To me, the point of the church is to help people discover the sacred in their own lives. First and foremost, that’s what I want the church to do for people who come here.
“Ask not what your country can do for you…” Church, my friends, is a lot less about what it can do for you and much…
Who is God?
Is God a human construct? A creation of our deepest wishes? (Freud) It is said we humans create God in our own image and God returns the compliment. One could be forgiven for wanting to give up entirely on God, given how many atrocities have been committed in “His Name”.
Who is to say who God…
continue reading…Who is God?
To know who God is, we first have to say what God is. God is insane. If you think about it, God has to be insane. God, the creator of the universe, what is, what was and what will be. Dude lives on three planes of existence at once. It’s like the lyric in that Gnarls Barkley song Crazy.…
continue reading…Who’s in Charge Here? And What’s the Agenda?
It seems like the news is full of natural disasters these days – earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes. These forces of nature that are so large, so powerful and completely out of human control. It drives us crazy. In a culture that looks for someone to blame when anything goes wrong, it’s hard…
continue reading…Who Are We, Made in the Image of God?
Josh had such a great take on this one, so let me preface by affirming his post. Yes. That is God. What he said. God is knowable in nature and in community and in the vibration of atoms. A person can find God through mystic experiences and in relationship with the world.
At the same time, as…
continue reading…Who is God?
Plymouth Congregational Church is not about everyone agreeing and believing the same things. It is about the questions we ask, the journey it leads us on, and the practices we cultivate. How you answer the question “Who is God?” I hope will be a personal journey that lasts a lifetime. And I…
continue reading…Meeting Jesus in the Fifth Grade
When I was ten, a movie called “The Parable” left an indelible impression. The film’s motif featured a traveling circus. (The old fashioned circus wagons at Baraboo, Wisconsin were used in the making of the movie.)
Watching the film, the impression one receives (even as a child) is that…
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