President
The Fund for Theological Education
January 01, 2012
I hope that you had a wonderful holiday season and that you are preparing for an exciting new year.
As people contemplate New Year’s resolutions, many Christians
around the world are preparing to celebrate the feast day of Epiphany,
which commemorates
God’s revelation in Jesus and his appearance to the world as
God’s beloved Son.
What is God’s revelation in you or your organization? As God’s
beloved, how will you appear to the world? On the dawn of a new year,
these are two
questions I am wrestling with on behalf of The Fund for
Theological Education (FTE).
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Author of "Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation"
April 15, 2011
It wasn’t what my student said that so startled me, but rather the tone
of his answer to my question about why “church” hadn’t come up in a
discussion of where we “feel most spiritual.” As though he were
supplying the obvious and uncomplicated result of a simple math equation
or the name of an element from the periodic table, Scott, a student in
my undergraduate Ignatian Spirituality course, answered
matter-of-factly, “Church is boring, but spirituality isn’t.”
Of course, I’d heard versions of this before (indeed, if you Google “church is boring,”
some 20+ million results appear, much of it, well, very, very
boring…). But this time was different...
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Director of Congregational Learning
April 04, 2011
Our “Theo-Epicurean” social experiment began with a few simple acts. My brother Simon created a Facebook group page. We took a picture of the homemade chicken pot pie we had just made, used it for the masthead, and uploaded all our food related photos from our cell phones. Voila! The Episcopal Foodie Network was born. Within days over 500 foodies of faith had joined and were posting like mad.
Elizabeth Drescher, a professor at Santa Clara University whose field is“contemporary spirituality at the intersection of new digital social media and ancient Christian wisdom,” an early contributor to EfN and “lurker” as she describes herself, named what had happened: we had inadvertently stumbled right into the heart of what she calls the “digital Reformation.”
What is that? Here’s how Drescher describes it, “The digital Reformation
is a renewal of the church inspired by new practices shaped by the
participatory, co-creative, collaborative, and distributed culture of
digital social media.” With it comes...
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Associate Director for Fellowships
January 07, 2011
I started in the preaching ministry at the age of 15. Fifteen is a
strange age. At least it was for me. I was just old enough to have my
own ideas about this and that. And I was just young enough to be very
certain about my ideas. But I was also just “green” enough to believe
that what I had to say might be useful to God in a preaching moment. I
preached my first sermon on a chilly spring day in April 1992 in
Chicago, IL. This was the pulpit in which a master preacher got up each
Sunday to “break the bread of life.” However on this Sunday, this
people and this preacher let the young people “run the service.” And
they let me preach the morning message....
That church was a grace-filled space in which I had the freedom to
flunk. With that freedom I was provided the space to identify, explore,
and reflect on my sense of call to ministry...
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Vice President for Ministry Programs and Planning
November 05, 2010
A Presbyterian recently told me there are 2,000 pastors looking for jobs in her denomination and 500 openings in congregations. I had heard this from another Presbyterian not too long before and have heard similar clergy-to jobs ratio from other denominations as well. The obvious next question: Do mainline churches need more people preparing for ministry?
Denominational leaders (including pension boards), sociologists, cultural observers, theological educators, congregational pastors and theologians are all working through this question from their particular contexts and with the tools of their disciplines. Their conclusions remain to be finalized.
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Vice President for Ministry Programs and Planning
September 17, 2010
You may have heard that Stanley Hauerwas, theology professor, ethicist and pacifist, has written a memoir, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir
In a recent interview with Christianity Today, Hauerwas spoke about teaching seminary students preparing for pastoral ministry. He said:
I try to give them a sense of what a wonderful thing it is that they are doing by going into the ministry. What an extraordinary privilege to every week be asked by people to preach. Our lives hang on it. I try to give a sense of the marvelous adventure it is to be brought within God's providential care of the world through the every day acts of preaching and Eucharistic celebration.
Wow. What do you pastors and would-be-ministers think about Hauerwas’s vision? Romance, reality or just rarely remembered?
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President
The Fund for Theological Education
September 03, 2010
Are you interested in strong leadership for the church? Do you want the church to thrive and be relevant in the world? If so, what are the keys to renewal and vitality?
According to a recent United Methodist Church study, the four key factors are: “small groups and programs; worship services that mix traditional and contemporary styles with an emphasis on relevant sermons; pastors who work hard on mentorship and cultivation of the laity; and an emphasis on effective lay leadership.” These four factors depend on the church giving more attention to the continuous work of cultivating quality leaders who attend to them. And because the average age of both clergy and parishioners are rising-- and because church is becoming less relevant to young people (according to the study), cultivating quality leaders should be a church mandate!
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