Crazy Faith Talk

Whehter talking about pastors serving in congregational ministry, changes in jobs, moves across country, or transitions in our relationships (coming together or parting ways), how do you know "it's time"?  How do we do the difficult work of discerning where we need to be, how we need to use our gifts, and what we need to do with our time?  How do we hold our sense of "where God is leading me" toge...

Children of the 1990s know the lyric from the band Semisonic's song, "Closing Time," which goes, "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."  And Fleetwood Mac sang honestly to an earlier generation, "I've been afraid of changing 'cause I built my life around you."  That's the challenge about being human--everything in in constant flux, and we are often afraid of change when it co...

What do congregations wish their new pastors would do or say as they begin serving together?  What do pastors wish their congregations knew about welcoming a new pastor into their midst?  As they continue their series on transitions in ministry, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve look at their own experiences at the beginnings of pastoral calls and appointments, as well as the stories and wisdom of o...

How do pastors come to be in the congregations where they serve?  How do they end up in new church settings?  And how do human processes, denominational structures and traditions, and the Holy Spirit all come together in the process?  As they start a new series this Lent, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve look together at transitions in ministry, and how each of our stories and church traditions hav...

Today we're getting personal--well, a little bit.  Over the course of this series, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve have offered an overview of basics of different kinds of spiritual practices and disciplines, almost like an appetizer sampler platter at a restaurant.  But what are each of our hosts' favorite main courses for their own spiritual lives?  Hear from all three today with some personal t...

Why feed a hungry neighbor, or give clothing to someone without?  Why welcome a homeless family in your church building or bring soup over to someone recovering from surgery?  Obviously (we hope) just because these neighbors have the need, and we are called to love our neighbors.  But something else happens to us when we deliberately look for ways to serve neighbors--we are shaped, so that we beco...

We need each other--that's part of what it means to be human! We are made for relationships with one another, and that's certainly true in our spiritua lives as well.  So as we continue our series looking at spiritual practices for a new(ish) year, we invite you to look at how it can be helpful to have some kind of trusted accountabilty group, spiritual director, or other soul-friendships who can...

The practice of fasting is an odd duck--on the one hand, it might not seem like much fun to go without eating (or some other thing in our lives), no matter how long or short the fast might endure.  But on the other hand, fasting is an ancient practice used and known across religious traditions, and is one part of personal piety that Jesus assumes his followers will be doing in some form.  The Old...

In this new series for the new year, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve take a look at practices for deepening your own faith life in a sort of sampler-platter approach, introducing us to different practices and traditions and inviting us to try them on our own.   Today, we'll look at different ways we can make prayer a part of our daily and weekly lives, in all kinds of circumstances--with others an...

Like any relationships in our lives, our connection with God can be strenghtened by intentional, habitual choices to spend time connecting and recentering on the God with whom we are in relationship.  Just like you might choose to set aside time to talk with someone who is important to you, or to re-read their letters or old emails to you, or to make the time to listen to their concerns, there are...

For nearly seventeen centuries, the "official" position of Christianity has been to say that Jesus Christ is both fully divine and fully human--but how did that get decided, and why does it matter?  In today's conversation, Pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve explore some of the story behind what is now usually called the Nicene Creed (or, to be a bit fancier, the Nicene-Constantinapolitan Creed, if i...

It's funny--in our Bibles, Luke's Gospel starts the "origin story" of Jesus with the start of his mother Mary's pregnancy, and Matthew traces his story back to the beginning of the people of Israel.  But John's Gospel goes all the way back to "in the beginning"--to the very creation of the universe!  In this very special Christmas episode of Crazy Faith Talk, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve look a...

In this last episode of their Advent exploration of pop culture that connects to the season, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve explore the 2007 movie, "The Nativity Story," and the challenges movie-makers have in bringing a Bible story to life. What details do you need to hold onto, and what other details can be shared with images that simply aren't there in a written text?  How do we bring together...

Okay, so there's not really a talking donkey with comically long ears in the Bible, but maybe the fictional story of Nestor (a sort of biblical cousin to the story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) has something truly important to tell us about the table-turning ways of God.  So this week in our Advent series looking at bits of pop culture that come to mind in the Christmas season, pastors Erica,...

Good news for people who like big round numbers--it's the 200th episode of "Crazy Faith Talk"!  And today around the microphone, our trio of conversation partners looks at the various versions of the story we know as Dr. Seuss' "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", both for its lessons about what we do (and don't) need for Christmas to happen, and as a way of thinking about how the gospels in our Bibl...

Like the little doors you open to count down the days until Christmas on your home Advent calendar, this season we've got a countdown of seasonal pop culture tidbits that help us to think about our faith in new ways.  So instead of little bits of chocolate or tiny toys to get each day, we're inviting you to join us this Advent for a series that will introduce you (or re-introduce you) to some pop...

After a wide survey of scenes and stories from the Bible, from the damp days after the Flood in Genesis to the tail-end of the last book of the New Testament, we've looked at a lot of the ways violence shows up in the pages of sacred scripture.  But what does it mean for any of us and how we live our lives?  How do we make the difficult decisions about what to do when we feel like violence as the...

In the early life of the church, followers of Jesus needed a word of hope to assure them that the destructive and arrogant ways of the Empire wouldn't last forever.  They needed to know that God's victory over evil was assured, and that there was reason to keep on in their faith, showing love and humility in the face of Rome's cruelty and pride.  Against that backdrop, the book of Revelation makes...

The wise and faithful Fred Rogers said, "Anything human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is manageable."  It was both a touchstone of his approach to children's television in his Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and also a key to his approach to ministry and life.  Rogers also taught generations of children to ask the difficult but vital question, "What do you do with the MAD that you feel?"...

Something has gone wrong when we lose our ability to be shocked by terrible things.  And sometimes we need to come face to face with the terrible things to which the Bible bears witness--even if they aren't stories we teach our children in Sunday School or don't hear much about in sermons.  That can be especially true when the culture or historical setting of a story makes it easier to hide or shr...

Lots of people know the story of when "Joshua fought the battle of Jericho... and the walls came a-tumblin' down." And from one perspective, the story of the Israelites taking the land of Canaan sounds like a triumphant victory and a happy ending.  The freed Israelites at last have a homeland, as God had promised their ancestor Abraham.  But what about the people who lived there already, and what...

Lots of people know the story of the Exodus--from the miraculous parting of the sea to the dramatic rise of deliverer Moses to the powerful signs of judgment against Pharaoh's Egypt known as the ten plagues.  It's a saga many know, not only from Sunday School lessons in childhood, but also multiple movies that have colored our imaginations.  But the story of the plagues sent on Egypt is more compl...

Human history is inescapably bloody--and so is the Bible.  We aren't great at facing up to those violent episodes in our history, or owning up to the costs of our actions and choices in human lives.  And if that weren't hard enough, the biblical writers themselves often seem to permit, allow, encourage, or even endorse violence against other people.  And yet, those same biblical voices also insist...

After the storytelling is finished, there are still lots of BIG questions to wrestle with from Esther's story, and they are all pressing for our lives today.  For starters, while we may feel relieved that Esther, Mordecai, and their people get a happy ending by the end of the book, what do we do with the times in subsequent history when tragedy was not averted?  The Jewish people were saved from H...

All the plot twists and tension has been building to this point in the story: Esther finally exposes the wicked Haman's plan, and her people are saved.  And as the ancient poets and storytellers of Israel so often spoke of, the schemes of the wicked become their own undoing.  It is as close to a storybook ending as you'll find in the Bible, with the villains defeated, the innocent saved, and the h...