Crazy Faith Talk

One of the most well-known Bible verses asserts that "God so loved the world" that God gave us Jesus and sent him into the world. Love is at the heart of what the Christmas story is about, and yet so often we settle for a shallow, limited, or conditional understanding of what love looks like, especially when it comes to God's love. As pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve take a look at this theme for t...

Halfway through Advent, after weeks of being reminded, "We're not there yet--keep hoping, keep waiting, be ready, and repent," the church's surprising way of keeping time calls us to rejoice.  Joy is a tricky concept, as it turns out, because it's more than mere happiness, and yet it feels very much like an emotion.  At the same time, joy seems like something we can practice as a virtue or a disci...

Anyone born this century has only ever really known a world with one major power or another at war, and our communities and country often feel uncivil and conflicted.  We have more technology than ever to keep track of our many responsibilities, but it doesn't give us relief from the anxiety of it all.  We are aching for peace, but as something deeper than just a quiet, comfortable feeling.  There...

It is terribly easy for the themes that recur in Advent--things like "hope," "peace," "joy," and "love"--to become empty slogans or buzzwords, or the vague wishes of a greeting card.  But there is rich and deep substance in the Christian practice of hope, and all the others, if we are willing to recover it.  This Advent, join pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve as we explore more closely the themes of...

It's easy to miss in between helpings of turkey and mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving, or with the neighbors already setting up their Christmas lights and Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" playing on a loop on the radio, but at the very end of the church's year is a powerful and surprising celebration called "Christ the King" Sunday, or "The Reign of Christ" Sunday.  And even though i...

As familiar as it is to many, Thanksgiving really is a strange sort of a holiday, if you think about it.  As an American celebration, it points backward in theory to Puritan colonists being grateful for surviving in a harsh new setting, but it wasn't until Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War still raging, that we had a declaration of a national holiday observing Thanksgiving.  On the ot...

It's the 300th episode of Crazy Faith Talk--can you believe it?  On this special occasion, we've got a brand-new conversation of classic Crazy Faith Talk church-nerdery--a deep dive into the history and meaning of All Saints Day, as well as a look at the related holidays of All Souls' Day, Halloween, Reformation Day, and Dia De Los Muertos.  Join pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve as they explore tra...

Is the "end" of our stories something to be afraid of, or hopeful about?  Whether we are talking about what happens to us individually when we die or what happens at the end of the world's story, we naturally wonder about where our stories are headed and what we do with our lives in the mean time in light of it.  And to be sure, both the Scriptures and centuries of Christian thinking and theology...

One of the more complicated tensions in Christian theology is how we make sense of human responsibility and God's will. Is everything that happens part of God's plan and design?  Are we responsible for our own actions, or just puppets playing out a predetermined script?  Is God guaranteed to "win" in the end, or could human beings keep on refusing God's goodness forever?  And is my hope of salvati...

You'd hope it's obvious that we should do good in the world rather than evil.  Christians should pretty much be on board with that premise--we are supposed to do good in the world.  And yet--we find all sorts of ways to complicate that pretty simple directive.  Sometimes we slide into thinking that we need to impress other people with our good deeds, or even worse, that we need to impress God with...

Not too many years ago, it was all the rage for businesses, organizations, non-profits, and even churches to write "mission statements" to define what they understood to be their purpose.  But asking about the church's "mission" conjures up all sorts of different pictures.  Is it primarily about getting non-Christians to convert to Christianity--or even getting people from "other" sects to join yo...

One of the challenges with reading the Bible honestly is that it doesn't work like a reference manual or a cookbook, but rather like a library of many voices from different times and places.  And that means it can be tempting for us to come to the Bible when we have questions about ethics, practice or contemporary issues, and only to read as far as the first answer that confirms our assumptions an...

Okay, so maybe you know the basics of the Christian faith: we believe in God, who is both the Creator of all things, and who has come to be revealed in Jesus of Nazareth and dwells among us by the Spirit.  We have a book of Scripture.  And so on.  But maybe we can go a little further.  This fall, we invite you to a closer look and a deeper dive beyond those basics in a series we're calling, "Chris...

In this final conversation in their series, "Why Denominations?" pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve share their own reflections on "Why am I still here?"  In other words, for all the troubles we can have in denomational hierarchies, all the fighting we do between congregations and traditions, and all the ways that big denominatal structures can be frustratingly slow and bureaucratic, why do we still...

As many pastors and families know already, sometimes in a broken marriage, divorce is the least-worst option.  It may always be heartbreaking and painful, but sometimes separation is less harmful all around than continuing in a toxic, dysfunctional, or irreconcilable relationship.  And sometimes it's that separation that allows each former spouse to move on, to grow, and to become healthy again. ...

It's certainly true that belonging in larger church bodies can help individual Christians or congregations to do more than they could alone--those denominational partnerships can be ways of making us more effective in our mission.  And yet at the very same time, those denominational affiliations--Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, Orthodox, and so on--can end up becoming barriers to our work with...

A hurricane sweeps across the country, and churches hundreds of miles away want to offer support.  A war halfway around the world is creating huge numbers of refugees, and we want to be of meaningful help but don't know where to begin.  Countless people near and far don't have enough food, medicine, or access to clean drinking water, but you don't personally have the contacts, the know-how, the eq...

They say that "tradition is the living faith of the dead," while "traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."  That tension is important as we think about the different expressions of Christianity that we experience across different denominations.  Denominations--and the traditions they represent--can be stifling, starchy, and dead when all they do is require successive generations to rigidly...

Jesus himself prayed for his followers to be "one"--and yet, to walk down the streets of any town in your area, you'll find different church buildings and denominational groups, sometimes right next door to one another, all insisting they worship the same God and follow the same Lord Jesus, but divided along lines of tradition, confession, and denominational groupings.  How did we get here?  In th...

In our last episode of our "Summer Self-Care Playlist" series, we take a look at those places and times that recharge our souls when we weren't necessarily expecting it.  Like the old John Lennon lyric says, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," after all.  And while there's certainly a place for scheduled times of renewal or stress release in our lives, it's worth be...

In a culture where being "busy" for the sake of being busy is often lauded as a virtue, sometimes people can feel guilty about taking time for themselves, or we think that "self-care" is about going away on a retreat to a distant location, or getting an expensive massage, or splurging on something decadent for yourself.  But sometimes caring for ourselves happens right in the thick of everyday lif...

There's a time in early childhood when we seem to make friends with nearly anybody who happenes to be around.  But in adulthood, we have the busyness of jobs and families, and we have a harder time finding connections with other people outside of those parts of our lives.  And yet, adult friendships, social circles, and affinity groups are as important in adulthood as they are when we're kids--so...

Everybody finds different ways to recharge in life.  Sometimes it's the old familiar tropes of a movie you've seen a hundred times, or a plotline you know you won't have to pay attention to for fear of missing something important.  And sometimes it's just the opposite--it's entering a whole new world in a story that lets you imagine things you have never thought of, or that works a different part...

If you're looking for a little bit of escapism, join us for conversation around the microphone again today as pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve continue their "Summer Self-Care Playlist" series, each taking a turn in sharing some of the movies, books, and TV shows we are finding some comfort in when we need unwind or relax.  This week, Erica shares some of her favorite go-to movies and series that s...

On the days when life feels messy, chaotic, and unresolved, sometimes it can feel really good to watch or read story you know will have a happy ending.  If you're in a season of needing to de-pressurize or relax, this new series from pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve is for you.  Each week, we'll feature a different piece of pop-culture that's helping us recharge our batteries this summer, from movi...