Category: Church and Ministry
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Sitting Shiva with Jesus
I’ve always liked the Jewish practice of sitting shiva (shih-vuh) for a week after a funeral instead of cramming all of the goodbyes into a wake and memorial service or funeral. Shiva.com has a good working definition: Shiva begins immediately following the burial and lasts for seven days, ending after the morning service on the seventh day.…
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Looking for your input: how do we talk about family in the church?
Typically, I don’t share bits of my writing work-in-progress because…well, it’s in progress, which means it’s not quite ready for prime time. But I’m breaking my own rule because I’m looking for some feedback on this snippet of a longer piece discussing the focus in the modern Evangelical church on marriage and family. I’ll first…
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What’s Growing In The Soil Of This Town?
The first building in this 13-second video, The Cotillion banquet hall, used to be Willow Creek movie theater in Palatine, IL. It was also the first site of Willow Creek Community Church, which met here from 1975-1981 before moving to their own building in nearby South Barrington. The last building in this video, a hulking…
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A word to those in the inner circle of a church
If you see something, say something. But if you say something, know it will cost you. In the wake of the exposure within the last year of toxic leaders and cultures at Willow Creek and Harvest Bible Chapel, there’s been a quiet self-assessment going on among some of those who enabled these leaders at an…
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Gun-shy Committing to Church?
My friend Joy and her family relocated to a new state a few months ago. I checked in with her recently, and asked her if they’d found a church yet. There was a long pause before she answered. “Committing to a new congregation is a lot harder than I thought it would be. We’ve been…
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Meet the Pelican Project
Years ago, I attended a women’s Bible study where the leader would read a few verses, ask us how we felt about what the passage said, and then read the notes from her pink women’s Study Bible to us if something seemed unclear. We had wonderful prayer times and warm conversation. But the “study” part…