Tag Archives: ministry
Disciples
And maybe that’s true! Maybe people really don’t need a forty-year-old suburban dad in a uniform to show up and recite a script when you may only have a few hours or days to live. To stand outside the hospital and pray for you in case you don’t have anyone else to do it. “Deliver your servant.” Part of me hopes it’s true, that no one needs that, because it’s certain that few people get it.
Ordination Anniversary, 2019
We grow accustomed to each other in a peculiar way, beyond excellence or inadequacy or anything else. God brought us together in the exemplary and characteristic way God acts in the world–through the ministry of the Church–and that forges a unique bond. Rupturing it, and forming it anew with new people, is a much weightier task than I’d been able to imagine when the bishop laid his hands on me and I knew only the pure and shiny farewells of the perennial student.
Ordination Anniversary, 2017
Here’s me at my ordination on this day in 2009. Back when I was preparing for ordination, I fancied myself a somewhat unlikely pastor. Then I learned that there really is no such thing as a likely pastor anymore, so I may as well get over that conceit and figure out how to do this job. […]
Chicago Diarist: Thought for the Morrow
(I wrote this in February, 2011, when I was serving as a part-time associate pastor in a small Chicago parish and it seemed that I was not going to receive a full-time call anywhere) “Be careful what you wish for” is advice that I long ago learned to heed in my preaching life. I don’t […]
Brutally Ordinary Things 