Crazy Faith Talk

In a new season and a new series, pastors Sarah, Erica and Steve explore the season many churches have begun observing this past Sunday, the season of Advent that prepares us for Christmas.  But in a culture that is already rushing head-long into Christmas sales, music, and decoration, having a season focused on waiting and taking the time to prepare can seem strange.  And in a culture that alread...

On this 250th episode of Crazy Faith talk, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve close their series on essentials of Christianity by looking at the beauty--and messiness--of actually living the Christian faith in community with others.  We aren't all like-minded or from the same background, and others have rough edges that grate on us, just as we have rough edges that grate on others.  And yet, we need...

Being a Christian can never quite be reduced to only head-knowledge or facts to be memorized.  It always carries with it some sense of the Mystery of who God is, and how the infinite, intangible God who is beyond physical form or limitations chooses to communicate with us through physical means.  That is to say, Christians don't merely memorize or think their way into knowing God, or even feel the...

The message "Jesus saves" is all over the place, from bumper stickers to billoards, to neon sign at store-front churches.  It's even there in Jesus' name, which means "God saves."  Countless people have been told by televangelists and celebrity preachers to "accept Jesus as your Savior," too--but what do we think that means? What does it mean to say someone is "saved"--and is it a past tense event...

From its earliest roots, Christians have claimed that in Jesus we are given the fullness of God and genuine humanity all at once.  And while that certainly says something important about the nature of Jesus, it also says something pretty powerful about the nature of God: that God is capable of being expressed through the fragility, vulnerability, and earthiness of humanity.  And it says something,...

We're used to thinking of "the Bible" as a single book, written all at once, since we carry personal copies within a single cover.  But it's really more of an anthology, spanning cultures, times, authors, and genres, which means that carrying a Bible is rather like walking around with a library that took a long time to put together.  In their ongoing series, "Christianity 101," pastors Erica, Sara...

Is God important?  Absolutely!  Is faith important in relating to this God?  Again, probably just about every professing Christian would agree there, too. But then the moment we start saying anything about who this God is, or what God is like, we're into the territory of faith-statements or creeds.  And there, curiously enough, different Christians head in different directions.  Some recite ancien...

In this new series about the Big Ideas and Central Questions of Christian faith, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve gather around the conversation table to look at what we mean by "faith."  Everybody seems to agree that "faith" is a good thing, and that it is important, but what exactly are we talking about? Are "faith" and "fear" opposites, as sometimes gets said by some in the COVID era, making it...

Whether you have been a part of congregational life since you were in diapers or have been wrestling from the margins of community about whether you even believe in God any god, or many gods, much less the specific faith called Christianity, we invite you to a new series meant to explore some of the Big Questions and Central Ideas of faith.  For folks who would call themselves life-long Christians...

Conventional wisdom is easy:  it's good to be strong, it's bad to be weak, and if you are being a good and faithful religious person, God will give you the things you pray for.  Right?  That sure is popular theology--and it sells books and draws listeners.  The only trouble is, it's just not the way things work for the God we know in Jesus.  As a case in point, we'll look at the curious case of Sa...

In their latest conversation exploring some of the Bible's stranger tales, pastors Erica and Steve take a look a curious episode from the end of the book of Acts.  While their fellow conversation partner Sarah can't be here for this episode, they look at a tale from Acts 28 when the apostle Paul survives a prison shipwreck, only to be bitten by a snake--and then how this moment slides into an exte...

Preachers often worry or joke about their sermons putting people to sleep, but it actually happened once, and to no less than the apostle Paul!  In a strange little episode from the book of Acts, we hear about a man named Eutychus, who falls asleep during a long sermon and falls out of a third-story window to his death--only to be raised to life again!  What are we to make of a story like this, an...

We often assume that being a Christian means always following the rules and living a quiet, respectable life, out of trouble and without drawing bad attention to ourselves.  And... sometimes that's true.  But sometimes the followers of Jesus knowingly go into situations they know will be provocative or will end with jail, punishments, or even the specter of death.  And yet, in several different st...

If you spend much time at all reading the stories of Jesus, you come to expect that he's always helping, always healing, and always doing something creative rather than destructive.  That's why it is so jarring to see a story in the Gospels where Jesus comes across a fig tree without any fruit on it and curses it so that it withers overnight--and it's even more unsettling when you find out that it...

Do Christians believe in angels?  Sure.  Demons and other unclean spirits?  They show up in the New Testament for sure.  But what about the spirits of the dead--especially good and faithful people like the prophet Samuel?  We don't really know what to think about a strange story like the one where King Saul consults a medium (sometimes called a "witch" in some renderings) who conjures up the spiri...

In a new series, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve gather around the imaginary table to explore some strange stories from the Bible--what they mean, where they come from, why they might have been remembered, and what they say to us today.  Kicking off the series is a look at the story of Jacob wrestling with...someone... during the night at a key moment in his life, before being punched in the hip a...

In this final episode of their series highlighting children's resources, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve look at two children's books that speak beautifully to God's love for the world and our ways of thinking and speaking about God, too.  And while we may often think about picture books as either only for preschoolers at bedtime or children's moment times in church services, we'll discover again...

In their ongoing series looking at media for children and young people, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve take a look at two offerings shared by Pastor Sarah: first, a book called Tear Soup, meant to explore grief and loss for young people, and then the Buck Denver series, created by Phil Vischer (also of Veggie Tales fame), which explores questions of faith and the Bible in an engaging and open way...

In the first episode of a brand-new series, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve start to explore and highlight different media they find useful for exploring faith with children and youth, whether resources for Christian education in churches, children's books for at home, or videos and authors that they find helpful for deepening their own faith.  As we start the series, we're introduced to the child...

In this final episode of their series highlighting voices of faith from outside their individual particular faith traditions, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve look at the contemporary voice of the late Rachel Held Evans, who made a profound impact on many millennial and Gen-Z Christians even though she only had the chance to write a few books before a reaction to medication took her life.  As a for...

The trouble with a word as big and broad as "love" is that we can all say we're in favor of it and still mean very different--even contradictory--things when we say it.  The church is no different. We know we're supposed to be a community grounded in "love" for God and neighbor, but all too often, the church has gotten swept up in the wider culture's assumptions that "love" is primarily about roma...

As they continue their current series listening to voices outside each of their own faith traditions, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve turn to a much-loved spiritual teacher in the Roman Catholic tradition from the twentieth century, Henri Nouwen.  Well known for titles such as The Wounded Healer, The Return of The Prodigal Son, Life of the Beloved, and numerous other works, Nouwen wrote extensivel...

Sometimes religious folks assume it's a new idea to say that Christians should advocate for sharing their resources and pursuing policies to help those most in need.  Sometimes you'll hear critics saying that's a recent invention called "the social gospel" but that "true" Christianity encourages people to get rich (or is at least silent about the goodness or badness of wealth, and indifferent abou...

Even in a high-tech, non-stop age like ours--or maybe especially in such times--we need wise voices who can point us to spiritual truth from the flies and the honeybees, and who can call us to simplicity of lifestyle and of faith.  That's a least part of what led one of our Crazy Faith Talk conversation partners to highlight the perspective and wisdom of Paisios of Mount Athos, remembered as a sai...

In this new series, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve each highlight voices from the Christian family from traditions other than their own.  Since Christianity spans two millennia, numerous spiritual traditions, theological perspectives, and denominational histories from around the world, there are a lot of people we can learn from, even while we own and claim our own traditions and heritages.  In t...