It’s Ash Wednesday. I was supposed to be serving at church today, imposing ashes on people for an hour this afternoon.
Strangely, I was looking forward to it. While Ash Wednesday is morbid, there’s also a sacredness to it that I appreciate.
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Last Tuesday, exactly one week after the girls started school, we got the dreaded call that 6-year old Hope had been in close contact with someone at school who tested positive for COVID.
Because of the close contact, Hope had to quarantine for...
Surely there’s a church somewhere that practices the kind of hospitality Jesus did, right?
I wanted desperately to believe this after my family found itself unwelcome at church during the last several weeks. Since then, I’ve continued to wrestle...
Last Sunday during worship, I sat in the comfort room with my two-year old, Kendall, in tears.
To be clear, I was the one in tears, not her.
We’d gone into the cry room to nurse. When we returned to the sanctuary, she started chattering. A LOT...
“You guys are making me not even want to go to church anymore!” shouted Hope, my six-year old daughter, from the backseat of our van as we headed home from our first day of church shopping.
We began church shopping at a local church that’s part...
NBC news has recently been airing a series of reports about the mental health toll of the pandemic on young people. As a youth pastor, I’m well aware of these. I’ve seen the toll this pandemic has taken on the young people in my ministry. I’ve...
I’m an introverted youth pastor who has, for years, considered myself to be a pretty good listener. Sadly, I fear that I sometimes listen BETTER to other people’s kids than I do my own. Having recognized this in myself, I was excited to read Becky...
I’ve gotten a few questions about my post, 7 Things That Are Working Well in Virtual Sunday School, that make it clear I need to clarify how we do Virtual Sunday School.
In our context, virtual Sunday School is a LIVE event, held (almost) weekly...
We woke up to about 9 inches of snow on Sunday morning and all I could think was, “I’m so glad Sunday School is virtual this morning!” Had we been in person, we would NOT have had any kids. Instead, we had a lively and robust morning of virtual...
Recently, I’ve seen an increasing number of posts in various children and youth pastor’s forums about how to rebuild an adult leadership team that’s been decimated by the pandemic. It seems that as many people switched to virtual ministry, their...