Category: Uncategorized
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Youth Ministry as Creative Contextualization
Categories: UncategorizedMy students love Harry Potter. Just recently, a sophomore asked (out of the blue) about how the time-turner plot in the third book of the series could possibly work out. With absolutely no hesitation, one student started to explain how it worked, while another quickly pulled out her iPod so she could play the relevant…
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Repent!
Categories: UncategorizedThis is the text from a sermon I preached on November 11th, 2012 – the first Sunday after Barack Obama’s second election victory. I think I might word things a little differently now (I think how we implement change via government requires a bit more nuance than what I said), but someone shared with me…
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What I’ve Learned About Immigration
Categories: UncategorizedLast Fall, after preaching a sermon in which I raised some concerns I have with how the church treats immigrants, in what felt like a relatively surreal twist of fate to me, a parishioner set up a meeting between me and my Congressman so I could voice some of my concerns to my representative. The…
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Christian Punk saved my Soul
Categories: UncategorizedWhen I was in the seventh grade, I was over at my friend Aaron’s house. Aaron was a couple years older than me, and so by definition was cooler than me. Just before I left, he showed me a CD he just got: Ghoti Hook’s Sumo Surprise. It was my first introduction to punk music…
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Why I’m (not) Conservative
Categories: UncategorizedIn watching and thinking about another election cycle, I’ve recently found myself in an interesting conundrum. I see lots and lots of commentary from friends and acquaintances on Facebook, and because of the circles I run in there is a word that gets thrown around that I am supposed to identify with, but I can’t.…
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Adolescence is an Internship
Categories: UncategorizedI may have mentioned it a few times in other posts, but I want to write a bit about what is becoming my dominant metaphor when I think about the life stage of the people I work with the most: adolescents. What adolescence is can me a tricky thing to talk about. It’s that developmental…
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Exceptions
Categories: UncategorizedThere is a phrase that my Type-A, rules-following personality simply hates to utter: “We CAN make an exception.” I loathe it. It is something I have to say after a deadline has come and gone for a retreat and someone wants to sign up two days before we leave. I want to say no. I…
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The Trouble with Conversion
Categories: UncategorizedThis post has made its way around facebook several times, and I figure that it is better to try and write a response with a (hopefully) concise blog post than to fill up everybody’s facebook comments with rambling stream-of-thought paragraphs. So here it goes: nitpicking For the most part, this blog has good points. Or,…
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The passages I’d rather not talk about
Categories: UncategorizedWhen I was in college, I had the general idea that there was no passage of scripture that I couldn’t interpret. After all, I was attending THE Moody Bible Institute. I was taught all the methods that I would need to look at any part of scripture, find relevant commentaries, do my research, and come…
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Youth Ministry at Thirty
Categories: UncategorizedWhen I was in college, I spent two summers interning under the same youth pastor. I learned a lot during those two 3 month periods, but there is one memory that particularly sticks out: one day, as he faced the complications that come with balancing the competing demands of his ministry and family life (as…