This week I posted something online that gained a lot of traction. Here is what I said:

Nothing will ever convince me that the Jesus who healed lepers, fed crowds on hillsides, and welcomed children everyone else tried to send away would look at a sick person without insurance, a hungry kid losing their school lunch, or a family fleeing violence and say they should have tried harder.

My whole point is that the church should be doing those same kinds of things today. Well, like clockwork, some guy I have never met and never spoken to in my life commented on post saying, “He would also believe life is in the womb.” I had to re-read it a few times because I couldn’t figure out what that had anything to do with what I posted. My post didn’t say a single thing about abortion. And to be honest, that guy doesn’t have the slightest clue what I believe about it. He literally saw a pastor talking about Jesus and the least of these and decided he already knew which team I…

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In high school I tried to wipe the ashes off my girlfriend’s forehead. In my defense, I had never heard of Ash Wednesday. My church didn’t do that.

It took me years to find out the church has been keeping a different calendar for well over a thousand years. There’s Advent for waiting and Lent for being honest about what it means to be human. Easter turns out to be fifty days long, and then there’s a long green stretch called Ordinary Time, which is the season we’re in right now. What I love most about it is that the calendar gives you permission to feel different things in different seasons. Not every Sunday has to be a mountaintop. Some seasons are for waiting, some are for grieving, and some are just for showing up and letting the roots grow.

The rest of that story about wiping the ashes off my girlfriend’s forehead, including the first time I was the one putting ashes on people’s foreheads (I had to google what to say), is in Chapter 5 of my book coming out this fall. It’s called A Different Kind of Christian.

Paid subscribers can read that section below. It’s still a draft so you’re getting the rough cut. If this newsletter has meant something to you, upgrading is a great way to support the work and get an early look at the book.

The Examen

This one comes from Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish priest who lived in the 1500s, and it’s about as simple as prayer gets. Before you get into bed tonight, sit quietly for a minute and replay your day like a movie. Then ask yourself two questions.

• Where did I notice God today?

• Where did I miss God today?

That’s it. You don’t have to come up with anything profound, and some nights the answers will be pretty small. I keep a running list of mine on my phone with the date next to each one, and it’s been so fun to scroll back through the last year and see all the places God showed up that I almost walked right past. Over time this little practice has trained my eyes to notice God in the middle of an ordinary day, which feels just right for this season of the church year.

The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann

If you’ve ever wondered what the prophets were really up to, this is the book I’d hand you. Brueggemann wrote it back in 1978 and it’s still one of the most important books on the Hebrew Bible I’ve ever read. His big idea is that the prophets spent their lives helping God’s people imagine a different world. He writes that “the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” What gets me every time is that, for Brueggemann, that work starts with grief. The prophets were willing to cry out loud about what everybody else was pretending was fine, and that honesty is what made room for hope. If you came out of a faith that mostly blessed the way things already were, this book will stretch you in the best way. Brueggemann passed away in 2025, and his voice is one I keep coming back to.

Grab the 40th anniversary edition if you can.

This past Sunday night my wife and I went to a comedy show with some friends, and it was such a great way to close out the weekend. The weather was beautiful and we just laughed and laughed until my abs hurt. I don’t do that nearly enough. And I think here’s something holy about a room full of people laughing together, and I drove home feeling lighter than I had in weeks.

Talk soon. :)

I probably spend way too much time on the internet, but one thing I can’t help but notice is how often myself or someone I know gets called a heretic by a stranger online.

A sermon is shared, a quote, or maybe even a news story about a church and within a few minutes the comment section is full of people who are 100% certain they know what is going on inside someone else’s heart. It’s ridiculous. Most of the time it happens to a pastor or someone who has spent decades preaching from and studying the Bible and they get described as someone who “clearly doesn’t believe a word of it.” The word heretic gets thrown around as casually as someone complaining about the weather. And the funny thing is, they would never say it to their face. Instead, they just write people off they have never met and probably never will. And what’s more annoying is the algorithm rewards those kinds of comments. The angrier and more absolute a comment is, the more that people react to it and the more people see it.

The All-or-Nothing Switch

Most of the harshest rhetoric comes from a way of thinking that works like a light switch. People genuinely believe that the Bible is either perfect in every detail and doesn’t contain a single error, or it’s no different than Moby Dick or nice poem that someone wrote last week. Those are the only two options. And if you think that way, then anyone who reads scripture differently than you gets flipped all the way to the other side. Even though the pastor, writer, or theologian has spent years preaching from the Bible, praying over it, and building their entire life around it, immediately gets labeled a heretic.

That switch-like thinking leaves out almost everything that is true. The vast majority of Christians across history have held the Bible as sacred and authoritative without needing it to be a flawless textbook. In Methodism, we talk about Scripture as primary, but read it alongside tradition, reason, and experience. The framework later became known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Scripture has always held a unique place in that framework because the church has heard God speak through the Scriptures for thousands of years and we keep hearing God speak through it today.

The authority is real. The reverence is real. It just rests on the living God who meets us in those pages and on Jesus, the one that all of Scripture points to.

Biting and Devouring

The letter to the church in Galatia talks about what happens when believers start fighting with each other like this. In Galatians 5:15 we read, “If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” The writer here is using some pretty intense language here. It is language of animals tearing at each other and the warning is that nobody walks away from that fight unscathed. I have seen it countless times in over 15 years of ministry.

It’s as if we have forgotten the 9th commandment. Bearing false witness. The assumption is that verse is talking about lying under oath, but it also means describing someone in a way they would never recognize. There is a rule that we should all follow:

May We Not Love Alike

John Wesley preached a sermon called “Catholic Spirit,” and in that sermon he asked a couple questions that I come back to all the time. He asked,

And then he answers his own question, “Without a doubt, we may.” Wesley had plenty of convictions, and he argued for them, but he also knew the body of Christ has always contained people from very different places and the things that unite us in Christ are more meaningful than they things we fight about.

We have to remember that faithful people have held the Bible up with reverence and humility in a lot of different ways. We can disagree and still be kind. You can believe someone is wrong about something and still describe them honestly and not jump to conclusions. You can ask clarifying questions first. You can still consider them to be a sibling in Christ. The church has always been a big, loud, complicated family table and there is room for your convictions and room for mine. Because at the end of the day Jesus is at the head of the table and he is the one passing around the bread.

My goal is to help people think critically, love deeply, and follow Jesus with both courage and grace. If that mission resonates with you, you can support it by becoming a paid subscriber or by hitting the “Buy Me a Coffee” button below.

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Hey friends,

I’m going to be honest. My book manuscript deadline is coming up fast, and I’m feeling pretty stretched thin, so I’m giving myself a little break from the heavier theological writing and sharing something more personal this week. I’ve got 3 different speaking opportunities over the next few weeks, and each one means a lot to me for different reasons. I’d be so grateful if you’d pray for me as I share.

Tomorrow at Leadership Institute

Tomorrow, September 30, 1000+ church leaders from all over the country will gather at our Leawood location for Leadership Institute, and I get to lead a workshop session called Equipping Ministry, From Invitation to Multiplication. I’ll be walking through three simple movements that can help any church, whatever its size, raise up leaders who go on to raise up more leaders. It starts with noticing what God is already growing in the people right in front of you and naming it out loud, then walking alongside them while they learn by actually doing the work, and finally letting go of the things that were never yours to hold so others can step in and shine. Would you pray for the pastors and church leaders in that room, especially the ones at small churches who are tired and running on fumes? I’d love for them to walk out with a little hope and one name of someone they’re ready to invite into more leadership.

October 10 at Healing House

This one is close to my heart. The Healing House community means so much to me. They worship with us every weekend at Resurrection Downtown, and on Friday nights they gather for their own worship service, and I’ve been asked to come share with them. I’ll be teaching from the Alpha course, which churches all over the world use as a relaxed, welcoming introduction to the Christian faith. The session I’m leading is called How Can We Have Faith?, and it’s all about how faith is something closer to trust than a blind leap in the dark, a step we take based on what we’ve seen God do. I can’t think of a better group to talk about that with, because so many folks at Healing House know firsthand what it means to trust God when life has been really hard. Please pray for God’s presence to show up and for the Holy Spirit to speak through me.

October 15 at B’nai Jehudah

On Thursday, October 15, I’ll be at The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah in Overland Park to talk about The Myth of America as a Christian Nation. I will be sharing with them why Christian Nationalism poses a real threat to religious freedom, pluralism, and the separation of church and state. I’m honestly thrilled and humbled that a Jewish congregation would invite a Christian pastor to talk about this, because our Jewish neighbors have felt the weight of it in ways a lot of Christians haven’t stopped to consider. The event starts at 6 p.m., it’s open to the whole community, and there will be refreshments. I would love for you to be there if you are local. They’re asking folks to register ahead of time at the B’nai Jehudah website or by calling (913) 663-4050. Would you pray that I’d speak with both courage and care, and that it would be a night of real friendship across our traditions?

Want Me to Come Share With Your Group?

As I've been saying yes to these opportunities, I've realized how much I love being in the room with people, whether that's a church staff, a business team, or a community group trying to figure out what faith looks like in real life.

With my book coming out next year, my calendar for 2027 is already starting to fill up faster than I expected. If you've been thinking you might want me to come share with your team or organization, now is a really good time to reach out so we can find a date that works.Just send me a note at hello@beaustringer.com, and we can see if it’s a good fit.

Here are a few of the topics I love sharing about:

• Raising up leaders who raise up leaders, for pastors, ministry teams, and business leaders who feel like the same few people are carrying everything.

• Christian Nationalism and what it means for our neighbors, drawn from personal experiences and how this ideology is a threat to democracy.

• Faith after evangelicalism, for anyone walking with folks who are deconstructing, questioning, or quietly drifting from church.

• How Jesus read the Bible, a fresh and hopeful look at Scripture for people who’ve been burned by how it was used on them.

• Building bridges across faith traditions, about the kind of friendship between Christians, Jews, and others that makes a community stronger.

No pressure at all. I just wanted you to know the door’s open.

Thank you for walking with me in this season. Your prayers and encouragement mean more than you know, and I’ll be back with more writing soon.

Love you all dearly.

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I don’t usually sit down and write letters to people in Washington. This week I’m making an exception, and before I do, I want to be clear about something. Our senior pastor, Adam Hamilton, is running for U.S. Senate here in Kansas, and I have intentionally said nothing publicly about that campaign since the day he announced it (until this week). I’m not endorsing him in this letter, and I’m not writing this on behalf of Church of the Resurrection. Our Church Council made a public statement here about the Vice President’s comments.

This is a personal letter and reflects my personal views only.

Dear Mr. Vice President,

I live in Olathe, Kansas, and I watched the full video from the rally you held here last week. I want to tell you a few things about the church you talked about, because it’s clear you don’t know who we are. You said our faith tradition is “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skinsuit of our (your) religion.”

That’s not who we are, and I’d like to tell you why.

First of all, we’re a United Methodist church, and John Wesley started the Methodist movement in England a couple hundred years ago. He built the whole thing around three simple instructions he gave his people: Do no harm, do good, and stay close to God. That was the blueprint. And when Wesley said do good, he meant visiting people in prison, feeding people, or showing up for sick people nobody else wanted to be around. That’s the same DNA running through Church of the Resurrection today. It’s just old-fashioned love God and love your neighbor stuff, the same as it’s always been. It’s just that when we say neighbor, we think it means all neighbors. That might be where you and I see things a little differently.

Oh, and by the way, churches like ours are full of people who disagree with each other about plenty, including politics. Someone sitting two rows from me on any given Sunday might vote completely differently than I do, and we still share the same communion table without either of us pretending the other one doesn’t belong there. That’s actually one of the things I love most and find so beautiful about this place.

For what it’s worth, let me tell you what actually happened at our Downtown location this very week, since this stuff doesn’t make the news. A man wrote in and said he had never in his life felt as kind and generous a welcome as he found walking through our doors. Two of our congregants and a pastor dropped everything to sit at the bedside of a man experiencing homelessness in his final hours of a cancer battle so he wouldn’t die alone in a care facility. A handful of other congregants volunteered their time this week stocking a clothing closet with jackets and coats to get ready for winter. None of that is “left-wing radicalism” that is a threat to traditional Christianity.

Nobody’s asking you to agree with every position a mainline church or pastor might hold. That’s unrealistic. But I am asking you to stop pretending that the millions of mainline Protestants in this country are some kind of radical enemy to be feared. We’re a lot more complicated and a lot more human than that, and I think if you sat in one of our rows for a Sunday, you’d feel that pretty quickly.

Would you be willing to come see this place with your own eyes sometime? Come meet the people running our food pantry. Come sit with the folks who show up every month to serve our local partner schools. Sit down with me and hear about the six-week Bible class I’m teaching right now. I think you’d walk away with a completely different picture than the one you painted on that stage, and honestly, I’d love to be the one who shows you around.

Let me know.

Sincerely,

Beau Stringer

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Somebody is going to ask you something soon that you cannot answer.

It might be your kid at the kitchen table wanting to know why God let their friend’s dad die. It might be the coworker who just found out you go to church and is genuinely curious what you think happens to people who don’t. It might be the friend at a funeral asking you whether you think her mom went somewhere.

Most of us have a couple of options available in that moment and they are both bad. We reach for the nearest finished sentence, some clean four-part answer we picked up in a youth group two decades ago, and we hand it over. Or, we go quiet, say something soft about how that’s a hard one, and steer the conversation toward something else. Then the person in front of us walks away with nothing either way.

And please hear me. You aren’t a bad person or have some kind of character flaw when that happens. Deep down, I think it’s more of a vocabulary problem than anything else. Most of us were handed an enormous supply of language for arrival and almost none for the middle of the road. Does that make sense? In my experience almost every phrase we know assumes the question has already been settled somewhere by somebody. So, when something lands that we can’t answer, our brain (and our mouth) goes looking for whatever’s closest or most comfortable.

So, I’ve been collecting sentences. Three of them, for the three situations where this keeps coming up. They’re short on purpose, because you need them available at the exact moment your heart rate is up and your thinking brain has left the building (or maybe that’s just me).

1. Say, “I don’t know, but here’s what I do know underneath it.”

This phrase is for when someone trusts you. The first half is the honest part and the second half is the pastoral part, and you need both of them working together. This is the sentence for your kid, or the new believer in your small group, for anybody in your life who came to you specifically because you’re the religious one they’ve got.

It helps to have your second half ready before you ever need it. Mine sounds roughly like this:

That’s the floor I’m standing on when everything above it is up in the air. Handing somebody your floor is worth about ten times more than handing them a conclusion you’re unsure about. Because the floor is the part they can stand on too.

2. Say, “I’m still working on that one.”

This one is for when someone certain is pushing you. And you will get pushed. It is bound to happen. Somebody is going to want you to declare a position so they know where to sort you, and the pressure in that moment feels enormous, it’s like declining to answer is itself an answer. You know?

Picture how it actually goes. You’re standing in a kitchen at somebody’s cookout holding a paper plate, and a guy you barely know finds out where you go to church.

That’s the whole technique. You say it twice without your voice changing pitch. Most of the time a person pushing like that is testing for the flinch, waiting to see whether you’ll either scramble to prove you’re on the right team or get defensive enough that they can write you off. Saying the same calm five words a second time gives him neither one, and the conversation usually just moves along to something else.

If you want to stay in the conversation after that, there’s a follow-up worth asking, and you have to mean it sincerely. I also love to ask people what would change their mind. A lot of times the honest answer is nothing at all, and now both of you have learned something real about what’s actually being talked about here.

3. Say, “I believe. Help my unbelief.”

This is when it’s 2am and it’s just you and God. This phrase comes from the father in Mark 9 with a sick kid and no patience left for a theology seminar, and it might be the most useful sentence in the Gospels for people like us. He says both halves in a single breath. He doesn’t resolve the contradiction first. He doesn’t go clean himself up and come back with a coherent position for review. He throws the whole messy thing out into the open and Jesus goes ahead and does what he came to do anyway.

And you know the hour I’m talking about. You’ve been staring at the ceiling for forty minutes and the thing running on a loop in your head goes about like this.

You can spend the next two hours prosecuting that case from both chairs, which I promise you will not settle it. Or you can say 5 words into a dark room.

I believe. Help my unbelief.

It gets you out of the courtroom, which is the actual problem, because somewhere along the way you quit talking to God and started arguing with yourself about whether you’re allowed to.

What these are actually for

None of these sentences fix anything, and they aren’t supposed to. What they do is keep you in the room, and staying in the room is the whole ballgame.

Most of the people who walked away from church left because there was no honest place to stand while they worked it out. Every sentence available to them required them to already be finished, and they weren’t finished, so they went and found somewhere else to be unfinished in peace.

You can be the person who has a sentence for the middle. Practice these three until they come out without any effort at all, because that question is coming sooner or later.

Write down your floor sentence before you need it.

Take five minutes this week, open a notes app, and finish this. “I don’t know how that works, but here’s what I do know underneath it.” Whatever comes after the second half is the thing you hand people when you’ve got nothing else, so it’s worth having it written somewhere instead of assembling it on the fly in a hallway.

Keep it to two sentences. Then read it back out loud a few times so it can make the actual conversation when it happens.

If you’d rather have something to pray than something to write, use the Mark 9 line as a breath prayer.

Breathe in on “I believe,” breathe out on “help my unbelief.”

Sixty seconds, twice a day, for a week. Try it.

My friend has a book coming out October 6 called The Other Side of Certainty, and it’s the book I wish I’d had about ten years ago. She writes about what happens when truth quietly gets swapped out for certainty and how much of our faith we end up outsourcing to people we love and trust. What makes it work is that she does it without a shred of contempt for the folks who raised us, which is rarer in this genre than it ought to be. Kristin is a teaching pastor at Mosaic Church and she hosts the Becoming Church podcast. It’s published by InterVarsity Press and you can preorder it here or by clicking the image below.

This past Sunday was Matthew’s Ministry Awareness Weekend at every Resurrection location. Matthew’s Ministry walks with people who have special needs and with their families.

In the photos below are Matthew’s Ministry participants standing on the stage helping lead our congregation in worship. It was a beautiful Sunday.

Love you guys.

I grew up learning the Bible on flannel board. Or maybe it’s called a flannelgraph? I am not sure.

One week it was Noah and then next week it was David with a felt slingshot. David would come down and be replaced with Daniel standing calm in a den of lions. And what I remember was each story was told with its own moral. Be brave like David. Be faithful like Daniel. Obey like Noah. Honestly, as a kid, I loved it. But what I absorbed from a young age was the Bible was a bucket of stories and inside that bucket were little jars with stories and lessons sealed inside. Nothing connected Noah to David. And when I got older it felt like the jars got smaller. Those stories became verses and the verses became like fortune cookies. I would write Philippians 4:13 under my baseball hat in high school. I would quote Jeremiah 29:11 to my girlfriend as I filled out my college applications. And I would never once stop and wonder what larger thing each verse might belong to.

But here is what I wish someone would have told me as I was sitting and staring at that felt board full of lions:

The whole point of reading is to find out where.

The Story Jesus Lived Inside

Jesus didn’t learn his Scriptures through flannel boards and as a bucket of jars. He would have learned them as family’s story. The saga of a particular people. He would have heard the creation account, the promise, slavery, exodus, covenant, the land, kings, prophets, exile, and the long ache of waiting for God to come back and set things right. First- century Jews would have carried that story in their bones. The Scriptures were the record of where that story had been and the promise of where it was headed.

So watch what Jesus does with that story. He walks into the synagogue in Nazareth and reads Isaiah’s promise of good news to the poor and then tells the people that today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Now, fulfilled is a story word. It is a word you use when a plot finally turns. In the Sermon in the Mount, he says he has come not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but instead to fulfill them. To carry the story forward to what it was always reaching toward. And his favorite phrase, the kingdom of God, was a plot announcement. It means the things your whole story has been waiting for is happening now.

And then in one of my favorite scenes in all the gospels, on the road to Emmaus, the risen Jesus falls in step with two heartbroken disciples, and Luke tells us that beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted to them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures. He started with Moses and told them the whole story front to back so they could see where it had been going. Their hearts burned, they said afterwards. Hearts burn over stories.

What Changes When the Bible is a Story

A story asks different questions than a jar of morals asks. Because you stop asking what the rule is here and start asking where this is headed. What is God up to? What kind of God keeps showing up in these pages? Genesis stops being a science debate. The strange laws become a chapter about a people learning to be different from empire. The prophets become the story’s conscience and call the characters back to the plot. And the difficult passages become moments in a story that is bending slowly and stubbornly toward the love of God and neighbor that bears the load of the whole thing. (Like we talked about in part 2.)

But you are in the story too, by the way. That is the wild part. The same story that carried Abraham and Ruth and Mary is still moving, and your one life is a scene in that story.

Next week we will wrap up this series by getting practical. We will explore what it looks like to actually read the Bible this way. I am looking forward to it.

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I want to encourage you this week to pick one gospel. Mark is the shortest. But read an entire gospel in one or two sittings the way you would read a novel. Don’t stop to read any study notes or try to solve anything in your brain, just follow the story and notice what Jesus is like when you take him in whole. Most of us probably haven’t done this, and I think it changes things.

Reading the Bible Again for the First Time by Marcus Borg. I love Borg, and he writes for people like me who learned the jar-of-morals Bible. He is so patient, clear, and unafraid of your questions. His way of reading Scripture as sacred story has helped a lot of people fall back in love with a book they had given up on. Pick it up and see what you think.

Our Labor Day weekend was packed full of excitement. On Friday night my wife had a work party at Kauffman Stadium (home of the Kansas City Royals). So that was a treat.

Then, on Saturday night, we hung out with some dear friends and played pickleball (my first time ever) and listened to some live music. SO fun.

Finally, on Sunday our whole family went back to Kauffman Stadium for another Royals game! A family in our church so generously gifted us 4 tickets behind home-plate.

We don’t get to experience too many weekends like this one, so I am still soaking it all in. Grateful is an understatement.

What did you do for Labor Day weekend?

Let me know in the comments.

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This is week 2 of a series where we are looking at how Jesus himself read and engaged with the Scriptures. If you missed Part 1 you can go back and get caught up here:

As someone who grew up in the church, I was handed a set of load bearing verses. These were the verses that the rest of my faith was built upon. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The wage of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. If you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart. I had these memorized and heard them quoted to me in sermons over and over again.

I was handed a load bearing structure. Out of the thousands of verses in the Bible my faith tradition had chosen 5 or 6 of those verses and built the entire house on them. Every time I thought about my faith or talked about my faith one of those verses came to mind. Now, nobody would ever say that out loud. Nobody said that those were the verses that mattered the most, but it had become pretty obvious.

Everybody has them

Now, here is the thing though. Every tradition does this. The reformed folks build on the sovereignty passages. Prosperity preachers build on Jeremiah 29:11 or ask and you shall receive. Fundamentalists build on all Scripture is God breathed (which is a verse about Scripture doing the load-bearing work for every other verse). Progressives do it as well. They lean hard on Micah 6:8 or Matthew 25. For me, it’s the beatitudes or Luke 4:16-21. Again, everybody has them. It’s impossible to read a book this large, and this diverse and not have a few verses holding up your house. Whether you inherited them or built them yourself they are there.

And all I want to do is help people understand that having load bearing verses is okay. It’s normal. And healthy. As far as I know, I don’t think anybody else is talking about this idea but it’s a big theme in one of the chapters of the book I am writing. I wasn’t taught this idea in bible college or anything this was just a realization I had a few years ago that slowly over time my house began to rest on some different beams. And with that shift I now felt more at home than I ever had.

The verses Jesus built on

Which brings me back to the question this series is asking. If we want to read the Bible the way Jesus read it, we should investigate which verses were load bearing for Him. And the cool thing is, he told us. Out loud. On the record. More than once.

When a scribe came to him and asked which commandment is the greatest, Jesus answered with something called the Shema. Hear O Israel, love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and then reached over to Leviticus 19 and added love your neighbor as yourself. Then he said something that gives this whole essay its name…

Did you catch that? Hang on a minute. That is a structural phrase. Jesus is literally describing which words hold up the house.

But he doesn’t stop there. Twice in Matthew’s gospel Jesus reaches for a single line from the prophet Hosea. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. He quotes it when he is being criticized for eating with tax collectors and when his disciples pluck grain on the sabbath. Go and learn what this means he tells the religious experts. When the situation at hand put the surface of one text against the mercy of God, the mercy bores the load.

So, according to Jesus, love of God, love of neighbor, and mercy over sacrifice are the things the rest of the book rests on.

Opening up your own walls

So here is the invitation I have for you today. Stop pretending you don’t have load bearing verses. Take your cues from Jesus and embrace them. Share them. Talk about them. Write them down. Or start opening up some walls to figure out what your load bearing verses might be.

The good news of this whole series is that Jesus shows us that renovation is possible. He inherited a sprawling, gorgeous, and complicated set of Scriptures, but he read them with Love of God and neighbor bearing the weight. We can learn to do the same.

Next week we will wrap up the series by looking at what happens when we read the Bible less like a rulebook and more like a story that is going somewhere.

I don’t ask very often, but if you find my work helpful would you consider supporting it with a few bucks a month? I write this stuff in the margins of family, work, and other projects. Your support helps me keep going. You can upgrade to a paid subscription here:

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Have you ever heard of bible journaling? It’s a practice that combines Scripture reading with writing, drawing, or reflection in order to deepen your relationship with God. If you love to draw or be creative, you may give this practice a shot. We used to have a bible journaling small group at one of the churches I worked at.

Here are some examples of this practice below.

Instead of a book recommendation this week, I am offering up a podcast recommendation. It’s called The Bible For Normal People and it’s a podcast by Pete Enns () and Jared Byas that provides biblical scholarship for everyday folks.

With scholarly guest interviews, guided tours through biblical books, and the occasional existential crisis, you'll walk away with the tools to engage scripture critically, ask better questions, and realize that maybe—just maybe—the Bible is a lot weirder (and more interesting) than you were told in Sunday school.

You can subscribe to the podcast wherever you get yours, but the image below will take you to their website.

It had been years since my wife and I were able to get away on a trip by ourselves without kids, and we made that happen last weekend. We went glamping in the Ozark Mountains and then swung by Silver Dollar City. We had a great time. Here are some photos from last weekend:

See you next week, friend.

We model almost everything on Jesus. We pray the way he taught us to pray. We try to forgive the way he forgave, or welcome the way he welcomed, or serve the way he served. In fact, entire traditions have built their ethics, politics, and their posture toward enemies on his example. And then, strangely, when it comes to how we read the Bible, a lot of us set his example down and pick up some method he never used.

So that is the question this series wants to sit with.

If Jesus is worth imitating in the rest of life, why not in how he handled the scriptures too?

Bible Drill

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church where we had this thing called Bible Drill. If you’ve never heard of it (I think other denominations might call it something else), a teacher would call out a scripture reference, and then we would flip as fast as we could to find the verse. And it was a legit organized competition. I was never great at it (my brain doesn’t connect with body fast enough.) It’s the same reason I am terrible at the card game Dutch Blitz.

I HATE that game.

Anyway, the lesson underneath Bible Drill was that every verse weighed the same. Even if it was never said out loud, I grew up believing that a line from Leviticus carried the exact same authority as a line from the Sermon on the Mount. And the faithful thing was to find the verse, read it plainly, and do what it said. Yet, that approach looks nothing like how Jesus or his neighbors read the Scriptures.

How a first-century Jew read the Bible

First, you need to know that Jesus didn’t own a modern day, Bible. It’s ridiculous that I have to even say that, but many folks don’t think about it. The Bible Jesus knew was the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, that were read aloud in synagogue and memorized from childhood. And the people reading it alongside him did not read it flat. Jewish interpretation in that era was alive, argumentative, and wildly creative. Teachers debated each other in public. We have record of it. Famous rabbis disagreed about hundreds of questions, and those disagreements were written down and preserved with honor. Reading scripture meant wrestling with it, and the wrestling was the point.

What Jesus actually did with the text

We can read in Luke 4 when Jesus gets up and reads from the scroll of Isaiah in his hometown synagogue and he proclaims good news to the poor and release to captives, and then all the sudden stops mid-sentence. If he would have kept reading, the next line in Isaiah was about God’s vengeance, but he rolled the scroll up before he got there.

Then, in the Sermon on the Mount he says, you have heard it said, quotes scripture, and then says, but I say to you, and gives a different direction. An eye for an eye becomes turn the other cheek. Hate your enemy becomes love your enemy. Something unique is happening there.

Finally, there’s another time when someone asks him which commandment is greatest, he does not say they are all equal. He names two, love God and love your neighbor, and says everything else hangs on those.

Reading with a center

It’s pretty clear—Jesus did not read scripture flat. He read it with a center. Some verses were load-bearing for him and others were not, and he trusted that God the Father was more merciful than the vengeance line in Isaiah and more interested in people than being precise. And that is okay!

Don’t miss this, friends…

Those are very different things, and when those two things get pulled apart, we find that Jesus went with God every time.

Next week, we are going to talk about load-bearing verses, or the passages Jesus built everything else on. We are just getting started.

I want to encourage you to do something a little wild this week. Write a thank-you note to someone who has no idea they helped you. An actual hand-written note on paper if you can swing it. This could be a teacher from 20 years ago, a co-worker that brings you joy, or maybe a neighbor who waves every morning. Keep it to 3 or 4 sentences and then mail it or hand it to them. It sounds simple, but this practice can be so powerful.

I may have recommended this book before, but it’s worth mentioning again as Dr Amy Jill Levine has been under attack online this week after being elected as the first Jewish president of Catholic Biblical Association. Dr Levine is a brilliant scholar, funny, generous, and she will change how you hear almost every story Jesus is in. Click the cover below to order it.

It has been a little bit since I mentioned my garden. It has gone so well, and we just finished making our third big batch of homemade salsa. We have more peppers than we know what to do with, and our tomatoes have been so delicious. We have learned so much this year and we are already making plans for next spring.

Let me know if you have any fun ideas for serrano peppers!

Yall are the best. Truly. Have a great week! Until next time…

Dave Ramsey has been trending over on Threads this week and it’s not because he helped someone get out of debt. It’s because he was absolutely hateful when a caller asked him a question about her inheritance.

If you haven’t seen the clip that is making its way around the internet right now, you can watch it here:

A caller named Monique told Dave and Dr. John Delony that she wasn’t sure she wanted to leave her inheritance to her daughters anymore because they had become “socialists.” To my surprise Ramsey then walked her through how he had structured his own estate to guard against this very thing. His kids get access to what he calls “God’s money” on one condition.

“If they’re not walking with God, they don’t get to manage God’s money”.

The Phrase That Does All the Work

When you stop to think about that phrase long enough, you begin to realize there is a whole theology wrapped up inside of it. And the big question I have for Dave and Dr Delony is who gets to decide what walking with God actually means? Because if I were to guess, I bet it would mean agreeing with the person holding the money. Or voting a certain way. Holding a specific political label or fitting inside a shape that someone decided for you a long time ago.

Dave is saying something out loud that a lot of us were taught to believe (especially if you grew up evangelical.) Somewhere along the way many of absorbed a view of God that runs on that exact same logic. We need to prove our alignment first. Get our politics correct. Or get our behavior in line, and then the inheritance becomes available. But if you fall short, then the door closes.

Inheritance Was Never Supposed to Work Like This

But that approach goes against everything we read about inheritance in Scripture. The prodigal son literally gets his portion of the estate before he’s proven anything at all, spends it recklessly, and the father is still scanning the road in anticipation of him coming home. Paul then tells a fractured church in Galatia that they’re heirs not because of anything they had done to deserve it, but because they had been adopted. Period. Something that had nothing to do with merit or worthiness but everything to do with a father’s choice. In the Kingdom of God, the inheritance comes first. Always.

What Gets Lost When Love Has to Be Earned

I grew up being told that belonging was technically available to me, but it was also quietly at risk. I could feel the floor beginning to shift the moment I began to ask too many questions, or my politics drifted, or my doubts got loud enough to where people started to notice. While nobody would ever use the word disinherit, the framework was definitely there.

Ronald Rolheiser talks about grace as something that comes looking for us before we have cleaned ourselves up for it. That’s exactly it. And once you have actually felt that kind of love land on you, the conditional version starts to look extremely small by comparison.

A Different Kind of Walking

Walking with God was never supposed to feel like completing all the things on the checklist before the money moves. I think it’s closer to wandering companionship that is ongoing, unglamorous, and full of wrong turns and slow returns. I think it’s similar to the story Jesus shared about the father standing on the edge of his property scanning the road. There is no waiting to prove yourself worthy of love.

Now, I don’t know Monique or her daughters, and I won’t pretend that I do. But what I do know is that a lot of us grew up being taught to hold love the way Ramsey holds a trust fund. Carefully, contingently, and with an exit clause tucked into the fine print. I don’t believe in that kind of God anymore. The God I believe in doesn’t have an exit clause, or criteria I have to meet before I am blessed. The God I believe in is waiting patiently for me at the end of the road.

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I have mentioned these tags before, but I love praying this prayer every morning during my shower.

What if you prayed that same prayer every morning as you got ready for your day?

Lord,

As I enter the water to bathe, I remember my baptism…wash me by your grace, fill me with your Spirit, and renew my soul.

I pray that I might live as your child today and honor you in all that I do.

I read this book in college, and it totally changed the way I think about the Prodigal Son story. I see it on the shelves of my local thrift stores all the time. Keep an eye out for it. It’s worth a read.

Last weekend, Resurrection hosted a workshop called Standing Together: A Guide to Queer Allyship and I was blessed to be able to talk about the theology of inclusion and affirmation of our LGBTQ siblings. It was a special morning and left feeling so grateful to be part of a church that stands with a community that has been so hurt by the church.

See you next Tuesday.

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Over the past couple of weeks, so many of my friends have spent 3 hours in the dark watching Matt Damon get chased by a Cyclops and cursed by a Sea God. While I haven’t seen the movie yet, it’s definitely on my list. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been out for a few weeks now and I have talked about it with probably a dozen people. And here is the thing—not one of them demanded proof that Poseidon is real before they’d let themselves enjoy the movie. They just watched the movie, felt the weight of it, and that was that.

I get a very different conversation almost every week doing the work I do online. Somebody will list the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the command to wipe out Canaan, or the firstborn sons of Egypt, and ask how I could still believe in a God who did all of those things. While I understand the heart behind the question, I think Nolan’s movie gives us one of the clearest ways to explain why.

We already know how to read this

Did you know there were other flood stories in the ancient world besides Genesis? The Epic of Gilgamesh has one, and the older Atrahasis Epic has one too. Ancient writers shared a toolkit of images for telling stories about a broken world starting over, and Genesis uses that same toolkit while pointing it somewhere different. Genesis points it toward a God who grieves before he judges and hangs a rainbow as a promise. Nobody sitting around a campfire in the ancient world heard that story and mistook it for a weather report.

We still know how to read that way. We just seem to forget it the second the book in question is the Bible. And every ancient author suddenly has to pass as a modern journalist, or it gets dismissed.

Now, part of why we do this to the Bible is because we use the phrase “God’s word.” People hear that assume it can only mean one thing. Every sentence has to function like a court transcript or the whole book stops counting as inspired. But that assumption is younger than it feels. Origen was already reading Genesis for meaning rather than mechanics back in the 3rd century. Augustine spent pages warning Christians not to embarrass themselves by claiming Scripture teaches bad science, and he didn’t even read the 6 days of creation as 6 literal days. Again, this is a fairly new issue.

The lens that actually holds

None of this makes every hard story dissolve into a metaphor. That’s not what I am saying. Canaan is still Canaan, and I won’t pretend a tidy paragraph fixes that. But what holds it together for me is a lens that I didn’t invent. Scholars and authors I love have been arguing for years that Jesus is the fullest picture of what God is actually like, and everything written before him gets read through him, not the other way around. Hebrews opens with almost the same idea, that God once spoke in pieces through the prophets and has now spoken completely through a Son. The clearest picture of God is a man who touched lepers, forgave the people killing him, and said the last would be first. That picture gets to shape how I read everything that came before it. It doesn’t erase the hard chapters, but it does tell me which direction to read them in.

Where that leaves you

You don’t have to defend every line of the Old Testament like a lawyer stuck with a bad case. You don’t have to throw the whole library out either. You get to read these ancient texts the same way you already read ancient texts. You get to read them with curiosity and not a magnifying glass looking for a lie. Let Jesus be the lens instead of making every verse carry equal weight on its own.

Next time somebody stacks up the list and asks how you can still believe, you can tell them that you are reading an ancient library the way ancient libraries are meant to be read.

Take a twenty minute walk this week with no phone, no podcast, and no music. Just you and the boredom.

I heard Arthur Brooks talk about this at the Global Leadership Summit last week and it really stuck with me. His point was that we’ve basically solved the boredom problem with our phones, and that solving it came at a real cost. The parts of your brain responsible for big picture thinking, meaning, imagination, and the future, only switch on when you let yourself get bored enough to need them.

So, take a walk without the noise. Let your mind get restless and a little uncomfortable.

If you want a lighter companion to Nolan's The Odyssey, go watch O Brother, Where Art Thou. It’s such a good movie.

The Coen brothers put "Based Upon 'The Odyssey' by Homer" right in the opening credits, and George Clooney spends the whole movie as a man named Ulysses trying to get home to a town called Ithaca. There's a cyclops played by John Goodman and a trio of sirens singing men into trouble by a riverbank. The best part is that the Coens have joked for years they never actually read the poem going in, and leaned on Tim Blake Nelson, the one cast member who had, to help them line the story up with Homer as they went. It is hilarious and I also love the soundtrack.

Last weekend was Student Ministry Sunday at Resurrection Downtown and my daughter read Scripture at one of the services. I got to share the stage with her while she did it. I am so grateful for a church that cares deeply about the next generation.

See you next week.

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17 years ago, I stood in front of a room full of people who loved us and promised my wife, Abigail, that would spend the rest of my life with her. Now, to be fair I had no idea what I was promising. I was a kid. 20 years old. I am sure I thought love was a feeling that I needed to protect, but what I have learned since then is that love is closer to a craft. It’s something you get better at by showing up and practicing badly for a long time until one day you look over at the person you married and realize you like her more than you did when you were 20 years old had no idea what you were doing.

Now, we are not a model couple. We have had some rough years, some hard conversations, and times where we felt like roommates managing a household instead of two people who chose each other. But what I can tell you is that we love each other more now than we did on our wedding day and when I think about why, three things keep surfacing.

1. We have a ton of fun.

This is the one people underestimate. Abigail and I do almost everything together. We cook together, do laundry together, we go to the grocery store together (most of the time), we clean the kitchen together, we go on walks together, we read books together (different books at the same time), and we genuinely just enjoy being around each other. None of that is romantic on paper, but it has become the substance of our marriage and here is why.

We make each other laugh constantly. We are ridiculous with each other in a way that I hope our kids find embarrassing for the rest of their lives. But it takes intentionality. Fun does not happen to married people by accident after a certain number of years. You have to keep reaching for it. Keep making the joke. Keep suggesting the thing that sounds mildly inconvenient.

2. We say the hard thing.

Nothing gets to fester in our house. Now, it took years to get there, but nothing gets to fester. Early on in our marriage I used to beg Abigail to fight with me. She didn’t want to tell me when I hurt her. She didn’t want to fight. She wanted to avoid conflict at all costs and would carry it around quietly and I would have no idea anything was wrong. 17 years later, she has ZERO problem walking into the room and letting me know exactly where I messed up. Seriously. It sounds like I am joking, but I am actually grateful for it.

My growth went a different direction. I have always overshared. Feelings come out of me whether I plan them to or not which has spared us a lot of silent resentment even though it hasn’t always been graceful. For a lot of men, this is the harder work.

Pew research found last year that only 21% of men had gotten emotional support from a friend in the past week, and 41% of women said the same.

That tells me that men reach for people less. And a lot of that comes from a culture that tells men that their inner life needs to be managed privately, and then we act surprised when marriages quietly starve.

3. We protect each other.

Everything in our lives is competing for our attention. There is work, and phones, and kids, and church, and the endless list of things that feel urgent. Marriage is one of the few relationships that will never demand your time loudly enough to win that fight on its own. It just waits patiently while you give yourself to everything else, and then one day you notice you have become strangers who share a mortgage.

So, we decided years ago to make time for each other on purpose. Over and over again. For 17 years. Date nights we couldn’t really afford. Conversations that went well beyond bedtime. Weekends where the answer to a really cool opportunity was no.

17 years in, and that is what I have. Have fun with the person you married. Tell them the truth quickly. And guard the hours. None of it is super complicated, it just takes being intentional and making it a priority.

Try the examen this week. This practice comes out of the Ignatian tradition and it takes about 5 minutes at the end of the day. You sit down somewhere quiet and walk back through the last 16 hours of so. While doing this you look for 2 things:

Where did you feel most alive, most connected, and most like yourself?

Where did you feel drained, small, or far away?

This isn’t you grading yourself or anything, it’s just you paying attention and then handing both of those moments to God before you go to sleep. I have found that most of us move through our days at a speed that makes reflection impossible, and so this is a way of slowing down enough to notice what our own lives have been doing to us.

Do it for 7 straight days and see if a pattern shows up.

I preached this past weekend on how the Spirit grows us in community. Many of you asked if it would be recorded so I thought I would share it here. I don’t want to make it a habit of recommending my own stuff, but the sermon is linked below if you would like to watch it this week.

I got this message from a reader recently and it brought me so much joy. It means so much that they find my writing relatable. Messages like these are a great reminder that there are actual people on the other side of this. I am so grateful for all of you and your support.

Have a great week, yall.

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This Sunday, August 2nd, I will be preaching my first sermon at Resurrection Downtown. The preaching itself isn’t new to me (I spent several years as the Senior Pastor of a non-denominational church and preached weekly) but my role now as Adult Discipleship Director means I primarily teach classes, lead small group ministry, and help people find their place, which is amazing. But standing up in front of this particular congregation for the first time is going to be so special. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity.

With that being said, I have spent the last week or so prepping for this sermon and we are going to be camping out in John 11. The story of Jesus and his friend Lazarus. I’m not going to tell you the whole thing today, but I want to give you a nugget to think about this week.

A Detail I Can’t Get Away From

If you haven’t read the story, Jesus already knew how this was going to end. Before he ever showed up, he told his disciples that Lazarus’s death wasn’t going to be the end of the story and that something bigger was coming. He knew that in a short amount of time he was going to call his friend out of a tomb and watch him walk out alive.

When Jesus finally arrives in Bethany, he sees the sister crying and the crowd is grieving and the tomb is sealed shut. And then the scriptures tell us that Jesus wept. It’s the shortest verse in all of scripture, but I find it one of the most interesting. Why cry? He knew what was coming. He knew that this whole scene was going to flip into the best possible outcome. If anyone was going to skip the tears to get straight to the miracle, it was him.

But he didn’t skip the tears.

Something to Sit With

What I keep coming back to is this:

Jesus didn’t treat the ending as a reason to rush past the grief that was right in front of him. He stood at that tomb with the people he loved, in a moment that was genuinely awful, and he let it be awful before he did anything about it.

I don’t know what you are carrying right now but I would bet that some of you are holding something you already have a good amount of faith will work out, and yet you still feel completely wrecked by it in the meantime. I feel that. And I think that is what it looks like to be human in the middle of a story that isn’t finished yet.

While this isn’t the main idea of my sermon, it’s something that really stood out to me and I felt led to share. Maybe it will be a blessing to you.

If you are in the Kansas City area, I want to extend a personal invitation for you to join us at Resurrection Downtown at 8am, 9:30, or 11:00 this Sunday 8/2 (or any Sunday).

Join us, say hi afterwards, and wherever you land this week, I hope you know that it’s alright to let it be hard before it gets better.

Speaking of grief, here are some practical tips to save for later.

Instead of saying, “Everything happens for a reason.”

Try, “I am so sorry, this is awful.”

—

Instead of saying, “I know exactly how you feel.”

Try, “I don’t know what to say, but I’m here.”

—

Instead of saying, “Stay strong” or “Just stay positive.”

Try, “This really sucks and I hate that you are going through it.”

—

None of those second statements fix anything and that is kind of the point. Jesus didn’t skip the tears, and neither should we (even though we mean well).

Kate Bowler’s book is one of the best ones I have read on grief and how to think about hard things in life. She writes about being diagnosed with stage four cancer at thirty-five, and the things people kept saying to her once she got sick. She is funny, honest, and doesn’t wrap things up in a neat little bow. I can’t recommend this book enough.

My wife and I got away for a little date night in Downtown KC last week. We had such a wonderful time. We enjoyed some good drinks, ate some delicious sushi, and then stopped for some ice cream on the way home. My wife is my rock. Whenever we get alone time (just the two of us) it’s worth celebrating.

Have a great week, y’all.

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Most scholars believe that before Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John ever got written down, before Romans, before Revelation, before any of it, Paul sat down around the year 50 and wrote a letter to a small struggling church in Thessalonica. Tucked inside that letter is an instruction the church has spent the last two thousand years finding creative ways to ignore.

The Frontliners

When I was a teenager, a group called Frontliners came to my Southern Baptist church for a week. Every morning there was a rally, loud music and testimonies and prayers that felt like pep talks before a game, and then they loaded us into vans and sent us out in groups to knock on the doors of strangers. We had one question memorized.

If you died tonight, do you know for certain you would go to heaven?

I hated every minute of it. I can still feel the specific dread of standing on a stranger’s porch in the summer heat, a kid asking grown adults about their death like I w…

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Hey friends,

One of the hardest parts of walking away from evangelicalism is figuring out what to do with the Bible itself. So many people I talk with (people right here reading this) have zero interest in opening scripture again. And I get it completely. The Bible got used on them like a weapon, and nobody wants to pick up the thing that hurt them.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of sitting with this. The Bible was never supposed to be a weapon. It was supposed to be bread. Something that feeds you instead of something that cuts you.

And the way back to that starts with a framework that isn’t very common in evangelical spaces.

I call this idea load bearing verses, and it’s become one of the most important frameworks in my own faith and in the book I’ve been writing.

Below, in the paid section, I'm sharing the actual excerpt from the chapter where I lay the whole thing out.

Write down the three or four verses currently holding up your faith. Not your favorites, but the ones that if removed would actually change what you believe.

I’ve been using the Lectio 365 app for months now and it has genuinely changed the rhythm of my days. It’s a free devotional from the 24-7 Prayer movement, built around morning, midday, and night prayers that walk you through scripture, silence, and the Lord’s Prayer. What I love most is that it doesn’t ask me to figure out what to read or how to pray on my own, it just gently hands me the next thing, whether that’s a psalm, a moment of stillness, or a question that sits with me longer than I expect. Some mornings I listen while I make coffee. Other mornings I actually sit still and read it. If you’re someone who wants a daily prayer practice but doesn’t know where to start, or if your old quiet time routines got tangled up with everything else you left behind, this one might be worth trying. It’s on the App Store and Google Play, and it costs nothing.

Our almost 14-year-old daughter was gone for two whole weeks this summer and came home this past weekend. What got me wasn’t just having her back in the house, it was watching her actually miss us. At almost 14 that is not something you can count on. Kids that age are supposed to be pulling away, and most days ours is too, that’s just how it works. But she came through the door and hugged us longer than she needed to and kept finding reasons to hang around the kitchen instead of disappearing into her room, and it hit me how special it is to know your kid genuinely missed you. Not needed you. Missed you. There’s a difference, and I felt all of it this weekend. So special.

I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

The rest of this one is for paid subscribers. If you've been getting something out of these letters, this is a good place to jump in, and you'll get early looks at the book as it comes together.

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Hey friends,

Last week I spent an entire day producing absolutely nothing, and it might have been the holiest thing I did all summer. My family went to the Kansas City Zoo and Aquarium.

We walked in enormous circles. We stood in line for drinks and food. My son leaned over the stingray touch tank with his arm in the water, waiting for one of those silky creatures to glide under his hand, and when it finally happened his whole face lit up like a stadium. My daughter took a million photos and videos. It was such a special day.

We watched the penguins do their little penguin business. We took a photo in front of a zebra-striped truck. We got tired and sunburned and happy, and then we drove home with nothing to show for any of it. No output. No deliverables. Nothing crossed off a list. Just a camera roll full of joy and four tired people who enjoyed each other’s company.

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Hey friends,

My home state just voted to put the Bible in front of millions of public-school kids, and I have been chewing on it all week.

As many of you know, I grew up in Texas and most of my family is still there. There are kids I love that are going to walk into these exact classrooms and get handed these exact lessons. So, this is not some far-off “culture war” headline for me. This effects my people, my hometown, and the book I love most.

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Hey friends,

Someone on Threads this week asked a question that I think a whole lot of people wrestle with, and my response to it got quite the reaction. I received several of comments from people expressing that “they had never heard it put that way”.

Here was the question:

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Hey friends,

I spent a good chunk of last weekend at a UMC Candidacy Summit. This is a weekend long virtual gathering where the conference staff helps pastoral candidates explore and discern their call to pastoral ministry. Now, I have been a pastor for a long time. I have preached hundreds of sermons, and officiated dozens of funerals and weddings. And there I was sitting on a zoom call sharing my call to ministry story (which began 19 years ago).

The pathway to pastoral ministry in the UMC is a long road. You must be a member of a UMC for at least a year and then then once you start the process (depending on which route you take) it could be another year until they make it official. If I am being honest, there is a version of me from a few years back who would have found the whole thing a little insulting. “I already know how to do this”, or “Now you want me to jump through hoops for a piece of paper that says I am allowed to do the thing I have already given my life to?” But the me …

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Hey friends,

Parenting teenagers is an adventure. Some days it feels like we are sailing on smooth water, but most days it feels like we are hanging on for dear life in a paddle boat being tossed about in the open sea. Don’t get me wrong, I love the ocean. I love a good adventure. But navigating the waters of parenting can feel isolating and insurmountable at times. That is precisely why I felt led to share with you what’s been going on in our world.

My son Luke is 14 and he just completed the 8th grade. He’s got this way of asking questions about things that most people just accept, and he does it not to be difficult but because he actually wants to know. He’s been doing it since he could talk. He’s a lot like his dad in that way, which is probably why I wasn’t surprised when he told me he didn’t want to get confirmed this year.

For those of you who didn’t grow up Methodist, confirmation is basically the moment the church turns to a teenager and asks…

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