Get out of the church…

I’m sitting here trying to work out some thoughts and several conversations have been running around in my head of late. I’m the coordinator for youth and young adult ministries for the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, and so I often get questions from churches (and not just in our diocese either) that sound like this [...]

How not to do church…

I’ve been reading blogs again (yay!) and rediscovered one, and found a new one that were both talking about similar things in different ways. Glenn Innes muses on an Einstein quote “The kind of thinking that will solve the world’s problems will be of a different order to the kind of thinking that created those [...]

Merry Gentlemen and other problems with the Episcopal Church…

At our Christmas Eve service on Sunday evening, we spent about twenty minutes caroling, and I noticed that the hymnbook had some interesting changes from the original carols I was used to singing…  For those of you who are not familiar with the Episcopal hymnbook, it was revised in 1982 to make it more “relavent,” although I have [...]

The Assyrians are coming!

Anna: "What happens when you fire God?" Jody: "I think you get invaded by the Assyrians or something…" Jody and I were just having a discussion over the messed-up-ed-ness (yes, it’s so bad, I have to create new words to discribe it) that’s happening in the Episcopal Church.  Normally, I don’t like to spend much [...]

Upside-down Ecclesiology

I spent an amazingly long time inside the Episcopal Cathedral in Nashville on Saturday as our diocese (the Diocese of Tennessee, which represents the middle part of the state) attempted to elect a new bishop. What I witnessed was very disturbing to me as I saw clergy voting against their own laity.  Let me explain: [...]

One Church…

"I believe in the Church, One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, and I regret that it nowhere exists." — William Temple Mmm…. I understand that sentiment.

Deconstruction of liturgy

Wow, this is fun! I’ve been lacking the ability to focus all my thoughts down into manageable pieces, and here a couple of questions has giving me plenty of writing material! Yay! Okay, so it appears our next task as an online community is to explain exactly what we mean by deconstruction of the liturgy. [...]

Two heresies, two metaphors, and a gardener

Spencer Burke—Seminar—Friday March 12, 2004—7:00-9:00 Metaphors of Emergence or as I renamed it: two heresies, two metaphors, and a gardener Excellence in a postmodern world is defined as a sense of authenticity. Excellence is being who you are and bringing all of who you are to what it is—not the performance of perfection. EDIT: I [...]