The Dean's Corner
Renewal & Gratitude
Thirteen years ago I was fortunate to attend a conference called CREDO, a week of renewal and discernment that’s part of the ongoing development of Episcopal priests. It was a kind of structured sabbath, where rest and prayer was integrated in...
Read MoreAmong the Trees
Overwhelmed by work in front of computer screens, many people in Japan in the 1980’s headed out to the wilderness. They found comfort and energy simply by walking in nature, and came up with the term shinrin-yoku ( “forest bathing”) to des...
Read MoreGreeting at the Door
In the church I served in North Carolina, we were visited for a stretch of several weeks by a young man whose behavior was erratic and unsettling. We welcomed him warmly, but were troubled by the way that he would come in mid-service, sit in pews...
Read MoreCognitive Resonance
I was in a coffee shop writing a sermon several weeks ago when I overheard someone speaking about their parents’ Christian faith. I didn’t hear the context, but I did hear him say that he just couldn’t understand his parents’ beliefs; he ...
Read MoreThe Downward Path
The way of grace is not upward, to places of power and status, but downward, towards those who hunger, suffer, or who weep. This is the path that walk with Jesus throughout the days of Holy Week.
Henri Nouwen once titled a chapter in a book ...
Read MoreThe “Organizing” Part of Community Organizing
I’m so grateful to Trinity’s Greater Cleveland Congregations (GCC) Core Team for leading a campaign of one-on-one conversations to help us discern where Trinity’s passion and capacity for social justice is strongest.
These conversations...
Read MoreTest Driving Realm
While traveling this week, I had some time between flights to take our new congregational communication platform, Realm, out for a test drive. You know what? It was really useful…and actually kind of fun!
Over the years, Trinity and many ...
Read MoreThe Cost of Great Love
When Jesus says to Peter and the disciples that they must take up their cross and follow him, he was saying that speaking truth, and living faithfully for others, often comes at great cost.
In his weekly blog , Dean Andrew McGowan of Berkele...
Read MoreEssential Tools For Connection
Let’s turn our phones and tablets into powerful tools for building our faith community!
I am old enough to remember phone books, spiral-bound church directories, and even things like kitchen phones that you clutched between shoulder and e...
Read MoreNext Steps in The Battle for Democracy
When Khalilah Worley of Greater Cleveland Congregations (GCC) joined me for last Sunday’s Dean’s Forum, she shared something striking: even as GCC has had great success on particular issues, the tide of voter disengagement in Northeast Ohio ...
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