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 →

Locked doors at Langhorne Presbyterian Church, Spring, 2020

For the past six or seven weeks, we have read and heard many retrospectives on the events of three years ago when the coronavirus began to spread around the world. As I look back, this second week in March was the week the reality of a pandemic left the headlines and became real in my world. 

At church, we had worshiped as usual on Sunday March 8 and, in response to the news of a spreading virus, had modified our mid-week program on March 12, canceling dinner but holding classes and choir practices as usual. But by Sunday, March 15, the church doors had been locked and worship and all other activities cancelled until further notice – we thought it might be a couple of weeks; you remember, to flatten the curve and all that.

As I think back three years, though, it is not the politics of masks and vaccinations and lockdowns that I most remember, or want to remember.

Yes, I received a nasty email – but just one – about ours not being the first church in the community to announce cancellations. My correspondent was sure that I wished the death of many. There were some strange forwards about sure ways to avoid the plague and dire warnings about martial law and the toilet paper cartel. Continue reading →