Month: March 2025

I want to share where I have seen hope recently.

Yesterday, I gathered with about 200 other United Methodist Clergy in Lakeland for 5 hours of worship, fellowship, learning, challenge and dreaming. It was our Clergy Day Apart and we do enjoy being together. Ministry is difficult at times and while I have a Covenant group and friends in ministry, gathering with other pastors to pray and worship and hope for the future was so good for my soul.

Our time was led by our Bishop, Tom Berlin and he started by painting a realistic picture of our current reality in this country and what the church is likely to face over the next few years. Then he walked us through a Pew Research Poll that tells us where those that are not in faith communities sit currently. According to this research, 62% of US adults describe themselves as Christians.

The Pew Research Poll found that of the US adults who participated in the research, this is how they describe their relationship to faith:

• 29% are religiously unaffiliated
• 5% Atheist (Belief in no God)
• 6% Agnostic (Belief in some higher power)
• 19% is nothing in particular
• 2% are Jewish
• 1% are Muslim

(I realize this only equals 64% and doesn’t represent the whole population, but it does give us, I think, a more realistic picture of the culture we live in.)

And of these same adults who were polled, 66% of adults who attend religious services say that most or all people in their services look like them.

These are the data points we now see lived out in our churches that are getting smaller and older and more homogenous. The above are simply facts and while facts are helpful in some things, they don’t always give us hope. We know that the church in America is getting smaller. We know that people who used to come to worship every week, are coming now only once ever 4-6 weeks and feel good about their attendance. We know that the church of the 1980’s and the 1990’s is over and we would be silly to go back. And you are all smart enough and wise enough individuals to feel that change, but we don’t stop there; don’t give up. Here is where I see the hope.

If there are 29% of folks religiously unaffiliated, meaning they grew up in some faith, but they are no longer associated with that faith anymore and there are 19% describe themselves as nothing in particular, that means, if you add up those two categories that almost 50% of US adults are still making their mind up about God and this thing called faith…how cool is that?! This means that US adults are still seeking, still questioning, still doubting, still yearning and the followers of Jesus, if they are brave enough, can make a safe enough space to allow them to question in community.

When John Wesley has trying to summarize what it meant to be a Wesleyan Christian in the 1700’s, he established our Three General Rules:

1. Do No Harm
2. Do Good
3. Attend upon the Ordinances of God (or stay in love with God)

Yesterday our Bishop proposed Three General Rules for the rebirth of a new United Methodist Church and I tend to like how he summarized them. I wonder if you could get behind these General Rules today.

1. Heal the Harm
2. Offer the Good of Christ to the Community
3. Teach People to Love God, love each other and love themselves, because they are deeply loved

Brothers and Sisters, what would that look like if we prioritized our time and our resources as people, as a church, as a faith family around these three things? If Christ is the great Healer, then let His hands and feet heal. If God is Good and Gracious, let us tell our neighbors about it. And if Jesus loved the world so much that he gave up his life to set us free, we have the best story to tell our community!

I don’t know about you, but hearts are opening and ears are listening and eyes are watching the people who call themselves followers of Jesus as we respond to these trying times. What new thing might God be up to as we obediently and joyfully respond to the work of the Holy Spirit?

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Within the church calendar, Lent is to Easter as Advent is to Christmas. It is a period of preparation. For the cross. For the resurrection. A period of preparation that begins with “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

The story that begins with the God of the universe putting on human flesh and entering the world through blood and water, ends as all human stories must: with death.

Christianity, predicated on following the footsteps of Christ — is about descent and not ascent. It is about surrender, it is about gratitude, it is about becoming nothing because, as Father Richard Rohr would say, “when we are nothing we are in a fine position to receive everything from God.”

And so on this day, we participate in a symbolism that holds together two things. The cross that is marked on our forehead is made of two elements, ash, from the palm branches of the Palm Sunday past, and this ash represents the dirt and mess of life. And oil, which represents the anointing of holy and sacred beings. Oil was poured on the foreheads of those being anointed to be kings or in positions of high and holy power. And so can we see the crosses of Ash Wednesday as a combination of both dirty and holiness; of messy and yet sacred promise?

In talking through our upcoming services with my husband Ryan this week (he is also a United Methodist Pastor) he shared something with me that I had never learned before. He said that the anointing happened on the forehead in the Ancient Times because it was believed that your hair was the gate to your soul. Because the roots of hair run deep, long or short, hair is very deep. It’s like the body and soul’s antennas transmitting energy from a higher realm, while also exuding the deepest, most inner parts of one’s being. Which is why we use the forehead for this cross. We hold on our foreheads a mixture of mess and promise; dirt and oil, sin and purity…but isn’t our life a combination or both of these things. Don’t we all live in these tensions every day as we walk with Jesus?

If Lent is the somber reminder of our human condition, then Easter declares that there is hope, but that hope lies not in escaping our humanity but in journeying through it. Because Lent also points us to the inevitability of suffering and how, even as followers of Jesus, we don’t get a “get out of suffering free” card. We know the hard truth that life without suffering does not exist.

One of my favorite authors, Rachel Held Evans reminds us, in Searching for Sunday, that healing comes when we “enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome.”

Anoint it as holy. Think about that.

What would happen if we really believed that? That our suffering, our neighbors’ suffering, was holy? Holy not because God delights in suffering but because God came and joined us within it. Holy in the same way that Communion is holy — the spilled blood, the broken body — because Christ comes and meets us there. Not symbolically, but sacramentally. Incarnationally.

And so tonight, if you are receiving the imposition of ashes at our worship service remember that you are mortal. That you are human (with all the perils and frailty the term implies). And remember that being human is a holy thing. That our mortality is a holy thing. Sanctified by the One who came, the One who died, and the One who rose again.

May we all have courage to face our deaths and walk more fully into life.