Dear members and friends of the Covenant Church, Tomorrow our denomination will begin its 2018 annual meeting — one that many expect to be a landmark event, as delegates vote on new leaders amid intensifying debate about the ECC’s position on human sexuality and marriage. Part of me wishes that I were on the floor … More My (Love) Letter to the Covenant Church
Tonight’s guest-blogger is Mark Safstrom, chief editor of the devotional journal Pietisten and assistant professor of Scandinavian Studies at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. More importantly, Mark is both a friend and a Mission Friend: that is, a fellow member of the Evangelical Covenant Church. What follows is adapted from his piece in next month’s issue … More Humble Leadership and Gentle Persuasion: A Plea to the People of the Covenant Church (Mark Safstrom)
Thanks to Brad Bergfalk, pastor of First Congregational Church in Litchfield, Connecticut, for inviting me to preach yesterday. It’s always a pleasure to preach in other churches, but especially in one as historic as FCC Litchfield. That congregation was organized in 1721, and the current building dates to 1829. My favorite radio station is called … More A New Song (Psalm 96)
As I write this, Vice President Mike Pence is addressing the the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. Some Southern Baptists aren’t too happy about that. As John Fea reported, a Virginia pastor named Garrett Kell found the invitation to Pence so tone-deaf and divisive that he recommended replacing that speech with a time … More On Praying for Donald Trump
Over the weekend I took the long way from Washington, DC to New Haven, CT in order to spend an hour in an 18th century outpost of Pietism in America. In 1741 Moravian emigrants came to the North American colony of Pennsylvania. It had been almost twenty years since Moravian refugees had first settled on the … More Moravian Bethlehem
Greetings from Virginia, where I’m commencing my summer travels on the East Coast! It’s my first big Lindbergh biography research trip: a few days this week at the Library of Congress, then several weeks in the main Lindbergh Papers at Yale University. But while I’m in a different part of the country working on my … More The Pietist Option Hits the Road
My denomination has its share of problems, but two things about the Evangelical Covenant Church make me hopeful for its future. First, it has generally done better than any other American church body at living out the “Pietist option” that Covenant pastor Mark Pattie and I sketched last year, in a book by that name … More The Pietist Option for a Multiethnic Church
Did leading evangelicals pointedly ignore the sermon preached at Saturday’s royal wedding, by Episcopal Church presiding bishop Michael Curry? One religion reporter thought so, at least based on some quick social media research: I checked a dozen of the most influential evangelicals on Twitter. Not one mentioned Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon-heard-round-the-world. I’m not sure they … More What Did Evangelicals Think of Michael Curry’s Royal Wedding Sermon?
This is one of those posts hasn’t really come together despite being on my mind for weeks. But it feels like it just needs to be shared in raw form — call it another example of “thinking in public” about God and the church. —– Last week at The Anxious Bench, I reflected on the significance … More Evangelizing Evangelicalism
Briefly this morning, let me recommend a new Patheos blog called Digital Wisdom. Though written by multiple authors, I know it best via Michael Paulus, the university librarian at Seattle Pacific University who was one of my hosts when I spoke at SPU’s faculty retreat last fall. “Within the last thirty years,” he wrote in the … More Digital Wisdom: A New Blog on Technology and Theology
