Please. Read this. I wish someone could have explained this phenomenon to me three decades ago as lucidly as Naked Pastor put it in his post.   I’ve been fooled again by relationships I thought were friendships, but those relationships withered (and in a couple of painful cases, incinerated) when one or the other of…

Most of us know a few bits about horse-and-buggy driving, technology-shunning Amish and conservative Mennonites. But unless we’ve grown up in the Dakotas or on the Canadian prairie, it is unlikely that we know much about their Anabaptist cousins, the Hutterites. The Hutterites share a common spiritual heritage, but are distinguished by their distinctive communal…

To read part one of this sorta series on corporate worship, click here. To read part two, click here. What do these two anecdotes have in common? Alice (not her real name) is a cast-iron, old-school prayer warrior. She knows the prayer needs of those in her church by heart, and works though the list…

Click here to read part one of this series.  The church was a massive cathedral, constructed on a prime plat of rich farmland over 100 years ago in order to provide a house of worship for the German farmers who’d settled the area. Suburbia tried to swallow it whole, but didn’t seem to be able…

It’s a perfect summer afternoon. You’ve settled into your box seat, twenty-two rows behind the visiting baseball team’s dugout. You flag down the hot dog guy and fork over your four bucks. He slaps a steaming red hot into a soft bun in a single motion, passing it to you as the ballpark announcer finishes…

“Why isn’t this church like that conference?” A friend recently reported that her teen daughter asked her this question after attending a teaching and worship event that drew thousands of people from across the U.S.  The young woman had experienced the sweet intensity that occurs when a large group of people is gathered for a…