I will not be alone in preaching the story of Doubting Thomas this coming Sunday.  The episode from John 20 is the Gospel text for the day in the Common Lectionary, and it is the “one week later” narrative often used the Sunday after Easter.  Thomas will be preached from many pulpits this Sunday.

You remember the story.  Thomas misses the Easter evening gathering of the disciples when the risen Jesus appears to them. Thomas shows up later, and the other disciples tell him they have seen the Lord. But Thomas says to his friends, “unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Jesus returns in a week and offers just the proof Thomas has requested. The best translation for what Jesus tells Thomas is something like, “Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe” (New English Translation).  The New International Version, like others, however, reads, “Stop doubting and believe.” The “doubting” translations miss John’s play on belief and unbelief, but hence the nickname. Continue reading →

Today is April 7, Good Friday, and by providence or ecclesiastical calculations it is a double anniversary for me.  On April 7, 2003, I received a cancer diagnosis, and on Good Friday, 2003, I underwent surgery for that cancer. Twenty years. The cancer was serious, so serious that the doctor would not allow me to leave the office until I had scheduled surgery. The first available date was 11 days later on April 18, Good Friday. They said they could just as well schedule me for the following Monday, but I said I thought Good Friday would be a good day for surgery.

The surgery went well and was followed by chemotherapy. Twenty years later, I am a long-term cancer survivor.

This week I have been thinking about twenty years ago – I rarely think about that April of 2003 any longer, so having it come to mind twenty years later may be a good thing, for it was a time of grace. Continue reading →

As one of my presbytery duties, I have been in contact with the leaders of a church whose pastor has just accepted a call to a new congregation.  The pastor is happy with a call that will put him closer to his aging parents, and his now former congregation is thankful for the leadership he provided during his time with them.  All is well. Except that the congregation must now find a new pastor, and these are not easy times for the finding of a new pastor.

As I prepared to talk with the leaders, I did some background work since I know nothing of the church or the town where it is located.  I checked our presbytery’s data on the church, visited its website, and, for some insight into the community, went to city-data.com.  City-Data offers a wealth of information on just about every city, town, and village in America. You can discover everything you could possibly want to know about population trends, the economy, housing, education, healthcare, weather, crime, earthquakes, and tornadoes. Continue reading →

I am serving on a presbytery committee, in fact chairing it, and it is made up of some of the most enjoyable committee members I have ever worked with in my long history of working with committees.  I love it.  We are called the Church Health Committee, and we are going to fail at our mission.

The mission we have accepted is defined by the denomination as working to ensure “that every one of (our) congregations will be an outpost of the Kingdom, with every member viewing himself or herself as a missionary on a mission.”  We are going to fail.

Sometime in the last couple of decades, we began to write organizational goals in terms of outcomes and outcomes in terms of universals.  The language of universal outcomes may be most commonly seen in the various initiatives of the education establishment – outcome based education – and its most recent iteration, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015.  The Department of Education says the goal of ESSA is ““to increase equity, improve the quality of instruction, and increase outcomes for all students.” Except that it won’t.  ESSA is a failure. More on that in a minute. Continue reading →

Easter Sunday is still a little more than three weeks away, but I’m already suffering from the Easter blues.

The church calendar requires us to go through some odd computations in order to get to the date of Easter – first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, but remember we’re talking about the Paschal full moon and the ecclesiastical equinox which occasionally are out of sync with their astronomical counterparts.  Anyway, check your calendar and it should show April 9 as Easter Sunday, 2023.

It is not the calendar calculations that have me feeling blue, however. Nor is it our secular culture’s tendency to reduce the day to a celebration of bunnies, chocolate, and daffodils. I don’t think it is the tendency for some to make Easter some sort of “we all get to start over” day, either. I think I’m feeling kind of sad about how the church, or at least some of the church, celebrates the day (or the weekend in the case of those churches running three-day Easter Eggstravaganzas). It’s as if Jesus’ resurrection isn’t quite enough.

I get lots of church-related advertisements on my social media feed. It’s not hard to figure out how the algorithms target me for the ads. My google searches and the click bait I take make me an obvious mark. I’ve got to say, though, if I were media manager at a megachurch in Phoenix, Arizona, I would wonder why I was paying to have someone in Auburn, Indiana, see my ads.  Repeatedly. Continue reading →