Thoughts on Sermon-Making (again) after Evening Goat-Milking
While milking one of our goats, Cora, I was thinking about the sermon moment in worship, again. I’ve already written many times about why the sermon bugs me. But as I continue reading about the emerging church and the shifts in culture, especially that shift from modernism to postmodernism, the sermon is such a modern form, no matter how you cut it. From homiletics practitioners such as Ronald Allen to Tom Long to Barbara Brown Taylor

Sermon, Worship, Participation
I’m uncomfortable with the “sermon” moment in the order of worship. First, I find writing the sermon a grind. I love the process of exploring and playing with the text, but I dislike the process of putting all that exploring and playing into a form, where freshness is lost, at least for me. This is not a new dilemma for any writer. How do writers maintain freshness, that unstablity and authenticity of language, when writing has to be contained in a form of some sort, so it can be understandable, so it does communicate something to listeners and readers

Ann Rice's Spiritual Memoir
I've been reading Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Ann Rice. Rice was raised as a Catholic in New Orleans, gave up God when she was in college, and now has returned to Christ and the church. If you knew Ann Rice as a writer of vampire novels, she is now a writer of novels only about Jesus Christ. She has given up the vampire genre.Rice writes about her Catholic upbringing as beautiful: "It's important to stress here that my earliest experiences involved beauty...I remember my childhoo

What I've Been Doing
I haven't written here for so long that I have forgotten the formatting that I regularly use. Over the summer, I seriously began to question my call to ministry. It started at the beginning of June, when at a yearly gathering of clergy, we heard three call stories, one of a seasoned pastor, one from  a young woman who would be ordained that weekend and a young man who was beginning the two-year process toward ordination. In their respective call stories, both of these young people mentioned that they were brought up—formed—in the church and how important this background was to them. They both mentioned how they had “a feeling,” an intuition that God was calling them