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Although you may be ready for the academic routine, young people will be diving back into schoolwork, homework, sports, rehearsals, exams, papers, and more. Finding time to be with God and to love their neighbors will be harder than ever.
You can shape the way your students will experience this school year. Whether you invite students to partner with you or to do it on their own, encourage the youth in your life to cultivate spiritual practices as they return to the hallowed halls of elementary, middle, or high school.
Click here for a list of spiritual practices your children and youth can do throughout the school day.
You can help the children and youth in your life cultivate daily spiritual practices by giving them a subscription to Pockets or devozine.
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To learn more about spiritual formation resources from The Upper Room, visit UpperRoom.org.
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Ministry Matters from The United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, United States "Preaching truth in the age of alternative facts, The Church and moral imagination, & How to love through resistance
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Preaching truth in the age of alternative facts by William Brosend
The clearest message of the last national election is a deep and abiding sense of alienation from the electoral process, a distrust bordering on disgust of elected officials (although only in general, with high ratings for one’s own representatives), and a constant refrain that the electorate feels it is not being heard. Nobody cares, nobody takes me seriously, and above all, nobody listens! This distrust of institutions and those who work in them and speak for them sounds familiar to students of history...
We need to acknowledge that many who hear our sermons neither are angry or frustrated, nor are so frustrated they are discouraged and disengaged. Instead they come to church to escape politics and problems. Other people are genuinely anxious and afraid, and while one might judge their attitudes to be exaggerated, their feelings cannot be dismissed. They, too, need to be heard because there is more than enough to be anxious about. However the stock market may be doing, economic insecurity is a genuine issue, the attacks on health care and other corners of the social safety net are real, and the threatened status of immigrant families touches many, many church families.
At the same time the fears of what may fairly, and definitely not pejoratively, be described as older, whiter parishioners cannot be dismissed by preachers who sincerely want to hear and not just be heard. They, too, need to experience that their pastor cares for them even though they know they did not vote for the same candidates last time. Or the time before that. One might dismiss their acceptance of a news story easily discredited by the facts, but as pointed out in the last chapter, it is inevitably a losing argument, made on the wrong terms from the start. Experienced preachers long ago learned that what most want is not to be agreed with but to know, to feel, that they have been truly heard.When that is what we want for our sermons how can we not do the same and listen carefully to our listeners?
* * *
On our best days, and often on the most important days of the liturgical and pastoral year [weddings, funerals, Easter], we will find ourselves preaching to the uninterested, the unconvinced, and the unimpressed; and if we are to preach to them effectively we have to find a way to listen to them as well.
"Preaching Truth in the Age of Alternative Facts" (Abingdon Press, 2018). Order here: http://bit.ly/PreachingTruth
How does one begin to preach for an audience that we hope includes those who are uninterested, unconvinced, and unimpressed?... By taking them seriously, listening to them, imagining and asking their questions, and doing so humbly and sincerely, connection is possible. What is needed in approaching all these varied groups of listeners is what I have elsewhere called “dialogical preaching.” Dialogical preaching is preaching turned toward the listeners, preaching that has learned to anticipate and answer their questions, even if the preacher remains the only one speaking.Our very preparation for the role of pastoral leader and preacher may be one of the greatest obstacles to connecting with the uninterested, the unconvinced, and the unimpressed. Preachers have spent so much time answering the church’s biblical and theological questions they have forgotten that the unchurched may have a very different set of questions on the same topics. While we are pontificating on the deutero-Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles, they are wondering what an epistle is. While we worry about forgetting to get gluten-free bread for communion, they wonder why it smells like grape juice or cheap wine, what to do with the plate of money someone just passed to them, and if they will have to stand and say who they are before they can escape...
Get involved. Go to meetings. Join something. Talk to strangers. And listen to them, to the sound of their lives and hopes and fears, to their questions, frustrations, opinions. How can the hope of the gospel be shared with those whom you hope will come for worship, and not just with those who do?
Listening is imaginative. Knowing what you know about those in the pew and those you hope will join them, how do you imagine them responding to the scripture readings assigned or chosen for this Sunday? What do they likely not know that will help them understand the text? Where may they be resistant to the implicit claim of the reading, and where may they say, “Exactly!” when they hear it? Dialogical preaching means asking the questions of your listeners throughout the sermon preparation process so that the sermon responds to the listeners’ questions, real and imagined. There is more to it than that, but it starts with showing that you want to listen as much as you want to be heard.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Brosend
William Brosend is Professor of New Testament and Preaching for the School of Theology at The University of the read more…
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The Church and moral imagination by Frank A. Thomas
People operating in the idolatrous and diabolical imagination have a difficult time discerning good from evil and are hungry for any form of spiritual experience, high or low, good or bad. Where is the moral imagination of the church? If religion sustains moral imagination, and there is little moral imagination, how is the church functioning? What is the church doing? My belief is that the majority of the church has not served the people well.The sum total of a balanced view of the American character and identity, the rituals and benefits of freedom for a few, the quest to perfect our Union, and the white supremacy refusal of equality is that the moral imagination of America in the second decade of the twenty-first century is dominated by the idolatrous and diabolical imagination. Again, what has and always will hinder the moral imagination of America is white supremacy that reserves the rights and benefits of America only to a few. The election of Donald Trump—who trumpets cynicism; white nationalism; patriarchy; ridicule of immigrants, women, and disabled persons; a Muslim ban; and the support of Trump from the KKK and alt-right racist groups—is indicative of the pervasiveness of the idolatrous and diabolical imagination. Let me be crystal clear: racism, misogyny, cynicism, xenophobia, patriarchy, and anti-immigrant blame discourse always surges from the heart of the diabolical imagination.
* * *
Earlier in the chapter I shared how Burke suggested that the spirit of religion has long sustained moral imagination and moral imagination must be expressed afresh in each age. This means that if moral imagination in America is primarily centered on the idolatrous and diabolical imagination, we must correspondingly conclude that there is a lack of moral imagination in the religion of America, and most particularly in the contemporary American church. T.S. Eliot, in reference to morality and spirituality suggests:The number of people in possession of any criteria for discriminating between good and evil is very small…the number of the half-alive hungry for any form of spiritual experience, or for what offers itself as spiritual experience, high or low, good or bad is considerable. My own generation has not served them well…. Woe to the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing. (Kirk, “The Moral Imagination.”)
"How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon" (Abingdon Press, 2018). Order here: http://bit.ly/DangerousSermon
Eliot’s statement is true today, and therefore, is an indictment of the majority of the American Christian church. His admission that his generation has not served the people well could be spoken of the majority, but not all, of the contemporary church in the second decade of the twenty-first century. People operating in the idolatrous and diabolical imagination have a difficult time discerning good from evil and are hungry for any form of spiritual experience, high or low, good or bad. Where is the moral imagination of the church? If religion sustains moral imagination, and there is little moral imagination, how is the church functioning? What is the church doing? My belief is that the majority of the church has not served the people well.Therefore, the purpose of this book is to clearly delineate how moral imagination can be fostered in the church through preaching. In the context of preaching, I define moral imagination as the ability of the preacher, intuitive or otherwise, in the midst of the chaotic experiences of human life and existence, to grasp and share God’s abiding wisdom and ethical truth in order to benefit the individual and common humanity.
Moral imagination of the true Christian faith advocates against racism, misogyny, patriarchy, homophobia, discrimination, cynicism, scapegoating, blame, and so on, and visions all human beings created in the image of God, and as such, warrants the ritual and benefits of freedom for all. It is simply not possible for adherents of the Christian faith to support systems and individuals that advocate that only a few lives matter. When the church advocates and supports individuals and systems that articulate and function in such a manner, the church has abdicated its leadership in moral imagination, and then the culture and society can only slip into the human default position of idolatrous and diabolical imagination.
Preachers would do well to look at key expressions of moral imagination. To speak to the moral imagination of twenty-first-century America, there are lessons that can be learned from the chaotic 1950s and ‘60s, a time of some of the most important expressions of moral imagination in American history. There are moments and periods in American history where, because of moral imagination, there is significant movement to freedom, where the movement to make the reality that all lives matter visible and tangible in culture and society moves us closer to perfecting the Union.
Excerpted from How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon by Frank A. Thomas. Copyright © 2018 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frank A. Thomas
Frank A. Thomas is the Nettie Sweeney and Hugh Th. Miller Professor of Homiletics and director of read more…
How to love through resistance by Ginger Gaines-Cirelli
This article is featured in the Decision 2019: One with Christ, One with each other, One in ministry to all the world (Aug/Sep/Oct 2018) issue of Circuit Rider
The language of “resistance” has a long history. For many it will call to mind those who’ve marched, stood on picket lines, participated in sit-ins, and put their bodies between trucks, tanks, and other people or cherished land. Used as a political term, resistance is generally understood as a kind of collective civil disobedience, focused on justice and human rights, and embodied in public actions like those just mentioned.
I’m not a political theorist or activist; I’m a pastor-theologian and a follower of Jesus. Thus, the language of “resistance” for Christians evolves through prayer, conversation, and practice in a different way.
Sacred resistance is a movement, not a moment. While that phrase is certainly a rallying cry to stay engaged in the critical conversations and issues of our time, it also conveys a substantive claim. Sacred resistance is a stance, a way of being in the world, and an ongoing orientation to the world. As followers of Jesus, sacred resistance is at the heart of our being, not just our doing.
This does not mean that we go around being defensive all the time. It doesn’t mean that we will always be angry and argumentative. Rather it means that, as those formed in and by relationship with Christ, our very being is turned toward God and attuned to God’s wisdom and way. Therefore, our inward posture centers on God and resists all that is not God, resists all that is counter to the ways of God revealed through Jesus.
Of course, we get turned around and find ourselves upside down all the time. The point is not that we claim to get it right. The point is that, as those who are in Christ, our call is to be deeply, profoundly with—with God, with other people, and with all the creatures of the world. As followers of the God whose life is poured out for others to bring about wholeness, our call is to find meaning and purpose in doing the same.
This, then, is our way of being in the world: to be with and for God and others and to participate in God’s life of love, justice, and mending. In the traditional language, life is found in the biblical requirement to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27 CEB).
"Sacred Resistance: A Practical Guide to Christian Witness and Dissent" (Abingdon Press, 2018). Order here: http://bit.ly/2jJMwbZ
When we gather for the called General Conference in 2019, my deep prayer is that those like myself who are honored with the responsibility to speak and vote as delegates will come without defensive resistance toward other people, a resistance fueled by preconceived or hardened opinions of one another. Instead, I hope we will arrive committed to “sacred resistance” toward the destructive energies that seek to terminate our communion and to harm those most vulnerable among us. I pray we will arrive energized and fueled by love of God and love of all our neighbors. I firmly believe this is possible—because with God all things are possible!—and that this is the only way we’ll discern a creative way forward that is truly aligned with God’s vision.Sacred resistance is ultimately creative. To resist hatred and violence is to make a positive, creative choice for the sake of love and tenderness. Where hatred and violence are consumptive, love and tenderness are generative qualities. In choosing to risk comfort, status, or safety to be in solidarity with another, you participate in God’s way, guided by God’s wisdom, empowered by God’s grace. If you are participating in God’s way, you have a share in the creative work because God is always at work creating and re-creating, mending and making new (cf. Isa 43:19; Rom 6:4; 2 Cor 5:17)!
This way of thinking about sacred resistance is a way of being, grounded in the grace of God, which tunes our hearts and minds to the beauty and brokenness of the world—to the beauty of The UMC and its brokenness. Sacred resistance is a way of dwelling in God that provides both a vision to work toward and the traveling mercies to get there. Sacred resistance moves us to action and holds us in the promise of God’s steadfast presence and love as we take risks in solidarity with others.
What would it look like for the United Methodist General Conference of 2019 to collectively trust God in such a prophetic, countercultural way?
If we truly try to follow Jesus, we’ll understand that God’s creative, mending, saving love is extended to the whole world and is particularly focused on the vulnerable and those experiencing pain or injustice. Even a cursory review of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life reveals that he spent most of his energy in the margins, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, confronting injustice, restoring life and dignity to those for whom these gifts had been denied. There are innumerable persons around the world who suffer the indignities of poverty, violence, injustice, and prejudice. Thanks be to God that our denomination is in solidarity and service with so many people across the spectrum of human affliction.
Yet The UMC singles out LGBTQ persons—who daily face stigma and rejection—and labels these human beings “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
Among us are persons of deep and thoughtful faith who are unable to reconcile their reading of scripture with the claim that LGBTQ people are just like them except for sexual orientation or gender identity. There are amazing, faithful, Jesus-following LGBTQ leaders and participants across our church at every level. Many of these persons have great compassion for those who struggle with the scriptures, because they have done the same! There are LGBTQ persons called by God to serve in ordained ministry. There are children in our pews soaking up what they see, hear, and feel, and some of them are LGBTQ. And there are countless LGBTQ persons who left the church or will never enter our blessed communion because they know they will not be received as God’s dearly loved children.
In his first letter to the Corinthian churches, Paul described life together: “Christ is just like the human body—a body is a unit and has many parts; and all the parts of the body are one body, even though there are many. . . . If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it” (1 Cor 12:12, 26 CEB). Many years ago, the deep truth of these words pierced my heart. The preacher said simply, “The body of Christ has AIDS.” It struck me as never before: my body has AIDS because the bodies of others suffer from this disease. What affects one, affects all. This is one reason why Jesus said to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
To love our neighbors as ourselves will require that we see the other persons as human beings, not as walking stereotypes or abbreviations or “issues.” A wise mentor recently reminded me that as soon as a stereotype gets activated, there is no more “personal” connection. The person or group loses any sense of personhood and becomes like an object, a faceless thing without history, dignity, or heart. In our focus on “issues,” people often get “lumped into” a stereotyped identity or perspective. People become faceless blobs in an amorphous, ideological “issue.” I can’t count the number of times a lesbian or gay friend has said, “I am not an ‘issue’!”
My earnest prayer for General Conference 2019 is that we will participate in God’s mending of the body of Christ, rather than choose to do further harm; that we will see one another as fellow human travelers on the way of Christ, and love all our neighbors as ourselves. Even in this difficult moment I am a person of deep hope. I resist because my hope is in God. And, thanks be to God, my resistance draws me near to evidences that hope is not in vain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ginger Gaines-Cirelli
Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, author of Sacred Resistance: A Practical Guide to Christian Witness and Dissent, is the senior read more…
WITH RUDY RASMUS
Rudy is a pastor, author, and global humanitarian. Along with his wife, Juanita, he leads the nine-thousand-member St. John’s United Methodist Church in Houston, one of the most culturally diverse congregations in the country. Pastor Rudy coordinates domestic and global anti-hunger initiatives in conjunction with concert tours by longtime friend and church member Beyoncé Knowles. A former columnist for O Magazine, Rudy and Juanita have two daughters.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to read Rudy’s book, Love. Period.: When All Else Fails, let me take this opportunity to recommend it to you.
This episode originally appeared at reClaimedpodcast.com. Reprinted with permission.
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reClaimed podcast
Charles Rotramel and Gregg Taylor host the reClaimed podcast on challenging subjects and social justice issues facing read more…
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My father Sam said, “We’ll get a picnic on the way.” I was around seven. My half-brother Joel about five years older.
Joel and I jammed our cane poles and our father’s rod and reel into our aging Dodge Rambler’s trunk and slid into our seats. Sam turned the key in the ignition and pointed the car toward Rocky Comfort Creek.
A few miles down the road, my dad pulled into a shabby country store with rusty signs for RC Cola and two ancient, weathered gas pumps out front. We all hopped out to buy our picnic: a pack of Saltine crackers and a tin of sardines in ketchup sauce.
We paid for our food and followed a two-lane county road through woods and fields until we came to a small bridge spanning the creek. Baiting our hooks with red wigglers, we stood fishing for bream from a mud bank a few paces down from the roadside.
As the morning stretched toward noon, my father opened up the paper bag that passed as our picnic basket, rolled back the lid of the sardine can, and passed out the crackers. Each of us placed a couple of sardines between two crackers and munched as we fished.
Maybe this doesn’t sound like the Bread of Life to you. To tell the truth, it would taste like cat food on a cracker to me these days. And yet, as I look back, I’m beginning to believe that I was offered the Bread of Life that day.
In a few years our prospects improved. My mom bought my dad a tiny jon boat. We fished on the water for bass using open face reels and artificial lures. Our picnics featured country ham and biscuits.
"A Resurrection Shaped Life: Dying and Rising on Planet Earth" (Abingdon Press, 2018). Pre-order here: http://bit.ly/2K2M3wB
Jesus never laid eyes on a biscuit. And no observant Jew’s menu would include country ham. But as the cicadas sang, the bullfrogs moaned, and the dragon flies hovered unsteadily above our fishing rods, ham and biscuits might just have been the Bread of Life. At least, that’s how it seems to me in retrospect.Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” (John 6:35) He had just miraculously fed a large crowd with a few loaves and a couple of fish. People scrambled after him to make him king and, once he had refused that offer, to secure a magical lifetime supply of groceries. In other words, they had missed the point of the multiplication of the loaves.
By feeding the crowd, Jesus is showing us who God is. God is the source from which we draw our very existence. Julian of Norwich’s famous vision of the hazelnut may help us understand Jesus’ point a bit more clearly.
In that vision, Julian held a hazelnut in her palm. A voice told her that the hazelnut represented the entire creation. Everything that exists. She was struck by how small and fragile the thing was. She wondered how such a frail, vulnerable thing could continue to exist. Why had it not simply passed into nothing?
The voice said, “Because God loves it. And that’s how everything comes into being. God’s love makes it happen.”
The divine love is a power that we are invited to open ourselves to. To partake of. To be sustained by. To be nourished by, and to be transformed by.
In Jesus we see that the life-giving, life-transforming love of God resides in the depths of even the most mundane of our very earthly moments. God invites us to participate in the divine life found in crackers and biscuits, in sunsets and starry nights, in smiling dogs and laughing babies, in lonely widows and homeless veterans.
When we partake of that love, it gradually forms us into the image of Christ. The bread of life. Eternal life.
Along with Lutherans, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and others, Episcopalians place the Bread of Life at the center of our worship. In the Sacrament of the Eucharist (or Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper), we participate in the divine life through the simple act of saying prayers and receiving a morsel of bread.
There are various ways to understand the Sacrament. I don’t mean to dismiss anyone else’s grasp of what amounts to a mystery, but here’s what I understand to be happening at our altars.
As I stretch out my hands to receive that bread, I glimpse things as they really are — if even for the briefest of moments. God’s sustaining, nurturing, transforming love is pouring itself out to me in even the most routine and mundane moments of my life, urging me to open myself to it and to let that love pass through me to the world.
The Bread of Life is not just a blessed communion wafer handed out in a church building; it is cornbread, Wonder Bread, and ham and biscuits at our dinner tables. It’s a morning walk in the woods. A nap with your dog. It’s your ordinary life... if you know how to look.
Life — life as it has always been meant to be — begins with love. The Sacrament helps us to see what is already being given to us.
"Love Makes It Happen" originally appeared at Looking for God in Messy Places. Reprinted with permission.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jake Owensby
Jake Owensby is the fourth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana. Jake is the author of several 
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Of many dark days for David, 2 Samuel 18 narrates the darkest. We may not think of David as the author of the Psalms, but this Sunday’s, 130, echoes the horror in his heart: “Out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord.”
In my book on biblical leadership, Weak Enough to Lead, I try to explore the way leadership inevitably is impacted by family complications of which no one may be aware. David’s family dysfunction could not be more public. Absalom violates the second portion of his Hebrew name (shalom, peace), stirring up strife and then open combat against his father, the king.
David is persistent in his over-indulgence of his children. He asks Joab to “deal gently” with Absalom — which has put Joab and his troops in grave peril! No wonder Joab chides him later to get his act together and recognize who’s been fighting with him.
Robert Barron, always brilliant and wise, notices David’s soft spot with his sons, and asks a surprising and wonderful question: “Does David’s ‘weakness’ for his children, his sentimental failure to exact true justice in their regard, in fact not represent the deeper and higher judgment of God?” Wow. A lack of tough love, an overabundance of mercy on children in need of discipline: does this mirror the heart of God? Like God, David relentlessly loves those who fail, who rebel against him.
The battle is a cruel one. The thick woods claim more victims than the soldiers and weapons, reminding Barron of the Wilderness Campaign during the Civil War, and then reminding me of Passchendaele in World War I, where the mud caused a high percentage of the casualties — as if nature itself conspires with the God who is left unmentioned to effect the outcome.
The searing emotion of Absalom’s dramatic death: wow. Absalom’s hair, certainly a symbol to his followers of his potency, and probably a sign of his narcissistic vanity, becomes his undoing — like Samson! His royal mount leaves him suspended in the air, a picturesque image of his unseating, his being dethroned. Hard not to think of Judas, dangling from a tree.
"Weak Enough to Lead: What the Bible Tells Us about Powerful Leadership" (Abingdon Press, 2017). Order here: http://bit.ly/2rYxHac
David, perhaps with the same heart as the father in Jesus’ story of the prodigal son, does not pump his fists in victory. His grief is beyond measure. In The Lord of the Rings, King Théoden, learning of his son Théodred’s death, grimly declares “The young perish, the old linger… No parent should have to bury their child.” David’s sorrow is even more harrowingly complicated since his son died while in revolt against his own sorry leadership. Or to shift the cause, and gender mix, consider the profoundly riveting and then funny scene where Sally Field plays the mom who lost her daughter in Steel Magnolias; it illustrates how a raging questioning is more faithful than a pious claim that God’s will was done.Barron points out the way David has changed, how the accumulation of losses has taken its toll on him; or, how this loss was more brutal. David, who was so very eloquent when Saul and Jonathan died (2 Sam. 1), now is reduced to nothing more (or less) than moaning his son’s name over and over.
Preaching on such a text, resist the temptation to find a moral. What would it be? Don’t start a civil war? Those who grasp for power are undone? I think the Bible invites us to hear stories of real people, truly important people, and how things unfold — so often tragically. We do not find stories of sweet, well-behaved families that pray and are blessed by a generous Lord. And so there is room in the Bible for people like… me, you, all of us.
* * *
Our Epistle, Ephesians 4:25–5:2, as is generally the case, has more of an obvious moral/take-away/theological lesson. How counter-cultural and subversive, in a day like ours, is Paul’s admonition to “Speak the truth”? So elusive, so rare, so despised... our listeners have even come to believe truth is a phantom and a fantasy, or is no more than my private truth, my ideology. Harry Frankfurt wrote what is for me the most important book for preachers to read: On Bullshit, a text which explores (he’s a philosopher, so it’s an intellectual riff) the dominant mode of communication and expectation in our culture. The bullshitter, Frankfurt points out, isn’t a liar. He doesn’t care about truth at all; it’s just a matter of talking somebody into something, so you say whatever. People experience this all the time, and they have their BS antennae out when you’re preaching, too. So you’d best beware of the nagging temptation to be a BSer in the pulpit.Paul counsels us: “Do not let the sun set on your wrath,” which is often parroted as great marriage advice. Not a bad idea, as lingering upsets do fester and grow rapidly like kudzu. But Lisa and I have figured out that sometimes, instead of plunging in while feelings are at fever pitch, waiting overnight for things to chill before settling a disagreement might not be the worst idea. The key is the commitment to iron things out and not let wrath win the day.
“Be imitators of God.” The medieval notion of the imitation of Christ is resurrectable, but tricky. For years people wore WWJD bracelets, but many were clueless about what Jesus would in fact do. Better to imitate the way St. Francis imitated Jesus: he listened to the Gospel being read, and that was his to-do list for the day. He took no cloak for the journey, he sold all and gave to the poor, he touched lepers.
My favorite article I’ve ever published (in The Art of Reading Scripture) was about Francis’s stunning imitation of Christ. Such imitation prompted G.K. Chesterton to suggest that “it is very enlightening to realise that Christ was like St. Francis.” As I suggested in my piece:
“Mimicry is hardly a faithful copy, or even a desirable posture. I can hear my son filing suit against his sister from the back of the van: ‘Daddy, she’s copying me!’ And yet, for precisely that reason, ‘imitatio’ is helpful. We can muster no better than a failed approximation of Christ, in laughable, faltering ways.”
The Greek verb, mimetai, is kin to our “mime” — a mimicry that is cool, but laughable, too. So is our imitation of Christ.
* * *
Our Gospel reading, John 6:35-51, has been covered in my previous blog on the entirety of John 6, with details for this week there, too."What can we say come August 12? 12th after Pentecost" originally appeared at James Howell's Weekly Preaching Notions. Reprinted with permission.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James C. Howell
Dr. James C. Howell has been senior pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church since 2003, and has served read more…
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LONDON (AP) — Thousands of Christian churches across the world are now using portable card readers or apps to take donations as people increasingly stop carrying cash on them.The Church of England says 16,000 religious sites now have access to portable card readers. In the U.S., hundreds of churches have installed kiosks where the faithful can swipe a card to donate. Others are popularizing smartphone apps where money can be sent over at any time.
“How we pay for things is changing fast, especially for younger churchgoers, who no longer carry cash, and we want all generations to be able to make the most of their place of worship,” said John Preston, the Church of England’s national stewardship officer.
The technologies vary from donations via website to apps and physical screens set up at the church. The contactless card reader, which can be passed around the pews like the traditional offerings plate, is a newer evolution that the Church of England in particular has been adopting.
It struck a deal with contactless payment companies iZettle and SumUp to create a system that all its religious sites can install. It takes Apple Pay and Google Pay but can also be used with a PIN code if needed.
The innovation seems to be yielding good results.
A startup that makes donation apps for churches in France says that the average contribution is two to six times higher than cash donations. Obole Digitale’s smartphone app is used by 34 dioceses that represent over 5,000 churches in the country.
That may also be due to the fact that electronic donations tend to be worth more than the small change people carry in their pockets.
St. John’s Church in London has a contactless card reader with preset donation sums ranging from 5 to 50 pounds ($6.50 to $65.50).
Graham Hunter, the vicar for St. John’s, says about a quarter of all voluntary donations are now via contactless payments.
He adopted the new technology after noticing open-air market traders in London using contactless readers for payments.
“In everyday life, people go into cafes and into supermarkets and they’re used to paying with contactless all the time,” he said.
His congregation includes 23-year-old Zoe Mathias, who rarely carries cash, unless she’s lost her debit card.
“I’m very glad that our church has entered into the 21st century with contactless payment,” she said.
The money raised is used on building upkeep, children’s activities and to stage events for the local community.
Hunter said the church realized it had to make up for a drop in cash donations and that technology is helping to do that.
He hopes embracing innovations like contactless card payments will show churches can be modern, forward-thinking places. St. John’s once installed a free public Wi-Fi zone in its garden, so passers-by could surf the web while on their lunch break.
“The Bible describes God as the chief technical officer, the CTO, a chief technician, an architect of all that is to come. So, God is creative and produces new technologies and so should we,” said Hunter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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“First principles”
Mike Poteet Poteet
Fifteen years after his death and 50 years after his long-running children’s television series premiered, Fred Rogers is again in the spotlight. The documentary film Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is reacquainting audiences with the soft-spoken man who made entertaining and educating young children through television his life’s work. While nostalgia no doubt drives much of the film’s success, its popularity also suggests Americans long for a clear vision of what it means to be a good neighbor. “Our politics and our discourse . . . seem to have gone toxic,” reviewer Chris Nashawaty writes for Entertainment Weekly, calling the film “a security blanket for our troubled times.”
Director Morgan Neville says his film isn’t so much a biography of Rogers or a chronicle of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (which aired from 1968 to 2001 on PBS), but rather a movie about Rogers’ ideas, according to Variety. In an interview with Deadline Hollywood, Neville says, “Fred Rogers takes us back to who we were at our inception to . . . speak the first principles about how we should treat each other.”Our neighbors have dignity
The first time Fred Rogers saw a television program, he saw performers throwing pies at each other’s faces and found the antics demeaning. “I got into television because I hated it so,” Rogers told CNN. “I thought . . . [there must be] some way of using this fabulous instrument to be of nurture to those who would watch and listen.”
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood spoke truthfully to children about tough topics. In one episode, Rogers buried a dead fish from his aquarium while talking about his own childhood experiences of grief. Once, he devoted an entire week of episodes to helping children deal with their parents’ divorce.
Rogers also dignified children by treating their everyday concerns, no matter how comical to an adult, as important enough to talk about. I remember feeling relieved when I was young and heard Mr. Rogers sing, “You Can Never Go Down the Drain.”
In 1969, as the government debated funding for the fledgling Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Rogers testified before a Senate subcommittee about how his show engaged “the inner drama of childhood.” “I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable,” he explained, “we will have done a great service for mental health.”
Embracing the dignity with which Fred Rogers treated children and their inner drama can help us become better neighbors to everyone. My friend the Reverend John Ehman, chaplain at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia, recently told me how he finds Rogers’ emphasis on telling children exactly what’s happening “wise guidance” for his pastoral visits to people who are hospitalized. “When patients know why you’re there,” he says, “and what you plan to do, they can be at ease. . . . This approach to communication implicitly . . . [values] the patient’s perspectives and feelings. . . . Isn’t that really how we’d all like to be treated in about any circumstance?”
Our neighbors are special
Rogers routinely closed his show by telling his audience, “You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.” He first heard these words from his grandfather, when Rogers was an unhappy, overweight boy teased by other children. The message encouraged him, and he passed it on to his television audience as a heartfelt affirmation of each viewer’s inherent worth.
Many moments on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. illustrated Rogers’ commitment to unconditionally accepting everyone. In 1981, 10-year-old Jeff Erlanger visited the show. When Erlanger was an infant, a spinal tumor was discovered, and it left him a quadriplegic. During the 1981 episode, Erlanger demonstrated his electric wheelchair and talked matter-of-factly with Rogers about good and bad things in his life. Writing on his website the Neighborhood Archive, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood expert Tim Lybarger says the episode showcases “the influence this man had on young people and the comfort they felt in his presence.”
Rogers once told Christianity Today, “The underlying message of the Neighborhood is that if somebody cares about you, it’s possible that you’ll care about others. ‘You are special, and so is your neighbor’—that part is essential: that you’re not the only special person in the world.” In other words, knowing you are special can lead you to help create a world in which your neighbors know they are special, too.
“God’s love and peace”
While Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, he didn’t speak openly about his faith on his TV show. Junlei Li, codirector of the Fred Rogers Center, explains to Religion News Service, “I think Fred was very adamant that he didn’t want any viewer — child or adult — to feel excluded from the neighborhood.” But Christian faith did shape Rogers’ work. Once when talking to The Washington Post about his career path, he said, “I really believe it was the power of the Holy Spirit.”
In a recent email, singer-songwriter Rick Lee James, who curates a Twitter feed of Fred Rogers quotations, told me about a prayer Rogers prayed before each taping of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: “Let some word that is heard be yours.” James prays the same prayer whenever he performs.
James believes that people’s reactions to Fred Rogers even today are “a result of the God-surrendered life that he embodied. His gentle, silent demeanor has taught me more about a relationship with Jesus than a thousand theology books.”
When Rogers’ widow, Joanne Rogers, gave Morgan Neville her blessing for his documentary, she told him, “Don’t make Fred into a saint.” Neville understands why. He said on NPR’s All Things Considered, “If you sanctify somebody like Fred Rogers it means that we don’t have to try and live up to him.”
For Christians, it’s ultimately not Fred Rogers we have to live up to — worthy role model though he is — but the one he himself tried to emulate. He personally answered all his fan mail, and responded to one young correspondent who asked him about Jesus by saying, “I want you to know that Jesus is important to me, too. I hope that God’s love and peace come through my work on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
Be sure to check out FaithLink, a weekly downloadable discussion guide for classes and small groups.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Poteet
Mike Poteet, writer of the teaching articles, is a Presbyterian minister (PCUSA), currently serving the larger 
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In an ABC News Poll in April 2018, seven out of 10 high schoolers say that students at their school cheat, even though most of them know that cheating is wrong. Brandon Gaille points out that “60 percent of adults cannot have a 10-minute conversation without lying once.” According to the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, there are approximately 27 million shoplifters in America today, and 25 percent of those are kids. We — both adults and kids — have a problem being honest.
Honesty is speaking and acting truthfully.
Here are five ideas for how we can help our children embrace Benjamin Franklin’s words of wisdom, Honesty is the best policy:
- Model It — We need to speak and act truthfully ourselves. The National Geographic article, “Why We Lie: The Science Behind Our Deceptive Ways,” notes that most people lie to save face or not hurt others’ feelings. Instead of hiding, let’s own our mistakes, be responsible, and seek forgiveness. When there are tough things that need to be said to a colleague, student or loved one, let’s say them…with kindness.
- Build Relationships — The students who responded to the ABC News poll suggested that they would be less likely to cheat if they knew their teacher cared about them and their work. Let’s take time to get to know our community, children and adults, creating a culture of honor.
- Provide Direct Instruction — Even if kids know that cheating, lying, and stealing are wrong, we must clearly define the appropriate behavior, such as “Being honest is ______.”
- Encourage Meaningful Work — In order for young people to take pride in what they do, they need to know it matters. By helping them connect knowledge and information to real-world application, they begin to comprehend the value of the concept or task. We must take the time to provide these explanations as well as to design purposeful projects.
- Give Opportunities to Make Amends — When kids mess up, we need to offer opportunities for them to make it right, whether that means redoing the assignment, returning the item, or whatever action will make it right. Instead of having a “gotcha” motive that instills fear, we need to communicate value, belonging, and purpose. A restorative approach does not negate natural consequences; it actually helps build understanding and connection.
Original version published on July 18, 2018 on EdCircuit. Reprinted with permission.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tamara Fyke
Tamara Fyke is a creative entrepreneur with a passion for kids, families, and urban communities. She has worked read more…
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