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The church is not dying, part deux: Stories of Resurrection
First and foremost, to be authentic we must always be a people who point towards resurrection for all people in the love of God. We don’t always have to say it quite like that, but we do need to live it just like that. Everything we do points to that fact: that God’s love transforms our deaths and turns them into new life.
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The church is not dying. It’s failing. There’s a difference.
I have never noticed or perceived that people were not interested in God anymore. People are incredibly hungry for God. It isn’t that people don’t want to experience God. It is that The Establishment Church of the 1950s is failing to be a place where that happens.
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Making space for something Else
Last week, I posted a version of an article that I wrote for the Hamline Church newsletter in December. The topic was being a Godbearer in Advent, on pausing to make room to be an incarnation of God in our daily lives. This idea is inspired by The Godbearing Life, by youth ministry extraordinaire Kenda Creasy Dean.
Now, though, as I think more about it, and as we approach the third week of Advent, there’s more to be said.
Being a Godbearer is making space for God to enter into the world through us. Now more so than ever, I think, with the rage and outcry over the grand jury decisions in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases, we are called to make space for a new thing to happen in us.
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Wait–why bother to go to church? Reflections for Advent
Because I work with young people, I have the privilege of never taking anything for granted—even church. I work with people at that stage of life when they are just figuring out who they are and who they want to become, and nothing is sacrosanct when you’re trying to figure out the world.
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A Goodbye to Chicago
This is a goodbye letter to the city that has shaped and built me over the past three years, a place that I am so happy to call my second home. This is all about Chicago as I’ve experienced it these past three years.
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Two Weeks of Travel: Part III, Staunton and Road Trip!
Hanging out in Staunton with Babylon 5, the old-world church yard, and driving back cross country…
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Sermon from 8/3: The Five Loaves and Two Fish
Here is the sermon I preached at The Clare this morning on the feeding of the five thousand found in Matthew. You can get the readings here.
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One of my favorite made-up words in the English Language is the word hangry.
I love this word because it is a simple smushing of two words together, which–when combined–perfectly describe a state of being that is both hungry and angry, and yet a phenomenon all of its own.
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Sermon from 7/13: Isaiah and the Parable of the Sower
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty…
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Thoughts on Palm Sunday
This Sunday was Palm Sunday, and in liturgical church traditions, it’s one of the weirder ones. It’s heavy with emotion, full of the ups and downs of a nonsensical, wild faith.
We start outside the church building, singing an ancient hymn and waving branches around like our ancient stories tell us the people of Jerusalem did. The whole congregation stood out in a city park–this morning being the first warm morning in God knows how long, here in Chicago. The air was humid and smelled like rain, but the wind was hot to us and dusty. (more…)
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Sermon from 12/22
These last few days before Christmas are marked by a sort of Holiday Cheer buzz that has worked itself up over the entire month of December into an almost shrill frequency, like a teakettle full of glitter.
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My Sermon from March 3
This is the sermon that I preached on March 3, the Third Sunday of Lent in Year C, on the tree that doesn’t bear fruit and the burning bush.
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What is a ‘Congregation’?
In which Maggie muses about what a church congregation actually is, especially in relationship to pastoral care needs…
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Thoughts about education in pastoral care
Musings on the imagining of pastors, who they are, how they care, and what role the romantic rural models have for us seminarians
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Prayers of the People for September 30th
In which Maggie shares her very first composition for the Prayers of the People.
