The Costly Reality of Forgettable Preaching — My Dad was a church pastor, so I grew up in the church system. I attended two services every week for most of my life and felt guilty when I didn’t. When I do the math in my head, I estimate that I have attended over 4000 church services. That’s…

Rethinking Inclusion in Christianity — Ian was the first kid who told me he was gay. I remember the conversation as if it were yesterday, much because it took me completely by surprise, and found me hopelessly unprepared to respond. I was a twenty-something-year-old youth pastor in a church. And, Ian had decided that I…

Enough is Enough — Dear Church, It’s over between us. There, I said it. I know this will probably come as a surprise to you, given your propensity to believe that you are God’s gift to the world. Heck, I even believed that myself for a while. You dressed up all nice for me…

Wrinkles, Wisdom, and the Courage to Wear a Speedo — Every now and then, my wife enjoys teasing me about how I am the elder statesman in our relationship — a whopping two weeks ahead, to be precise. It all began when I hit the grand age of 30, and she was still hanging on to the last shreds of…

Escaping Evangelical Gaslighting and Finding Healing — Recently I wrote a deeply personal piece on my struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), arising from my life-long involvement in the evangelical church and particularly my time in ministry. Afterward, I received many supportive, kind, and encouraging comments from a whole lot of people who appreciated my honesty and…

16 Years of Marriage and a New Kind of Commitment — Today, I celebrate two anniversaries. Today, it is 16 years to the day since we were married. And today is three months to the day since they found the cancer in my wife’s body. Advanced stage four bowel cancer, to be precise. Suddenly, every anniversary, every milestone — however small…

Supporting Others Through Tough Times — Sitting around the lunchroom table at work, the usual banter and lighthearted chatter ensued. It consisted mainly of complaining about the workload, whining about this manager or that manager, and ribbing each other for the various mishaps that occur at work — all friendly, of course. Politics and religion aren’t…

Critiquing the “go-to” phrase of lazy believers — “The Bible says so.” It is a phrase often used by lazy Christians, usually at the end of some argument over ethics or theology, most often when the argument is already lost. In one final desperate play, they bring out their “Bible-says-so” trump card as if the phrase itself settles…

Quite a bit, it turns out. — My wife is the kind of person who loves researching the history of our long-lost ancestors and putting them together in a family tree. She has traced her side of the family back hundreds and hundreds of years. She assures me that she is the descendent of wealthy French wine-makers…