How do you pray when life looks like gibberish, when so many words are running together—pandemic, police brutality, protest, Confederate monuments, masks—and you can’t make sense of any of it? The present and past collide as history literally falls to the ground—though these rocks don’t cry out. If they could, they would sing the praises […]
“What can we do?” “We need to say something!” For many church leaders, who still see themselves as an authority despite the cultural shift away from religious institutions, the most appropriate response is to do the work of decolonizing your institution or place of influence, to speak up early, often and publicly about the […]
Well, Church, times have changed before we could call a business meeting or change our bylaws as the protests around the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain and countless others draw a dividing line between generations. Without a committee vote or a conversation with “the powers that be,” confederate moments are […]
I was recently invited to preach at Walker Memorial Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. We met via Zoom (of course) to finalize the details and to introduce ourselves to each other. Each preacher would enter the sanctuary to be filmed individually. We would preach to empty pews and take our cues from the balcony where […]
The news has a cycle but I still run in a circle. Most days, I lace up my running shoes, stretch and shake my legs out before running around a homemade track around a pond. I run to work out problems. I run down leads on ideas. I run to reflect on my life and […]