AIDS, homelessness, wars fought at a distance and quickly, famine in far-off countries, marriages, deaths, cocaine addiction and alcoholism, divorce, youth struggling with coming of age, sickness. These were the issues that I thought would make up my ministry when I was in seminary in the early 1990s. The first funeral I conducted while I was still a student was for a woman who’d died of AIDS. I’d worked with “at risk” youth in public housing as a volunteer and then on staff at a Boys and Girls Club. Peers in college had dabbled in drugs like marijuana and cocaine; one was in AA by her junior year. My classmates and I watched Operation Desert Storm unfold like a video game on CNN, and not two months later decisive victory and a cease-fire was declared. Perhaps all that angst wasn’t warranted after all. Wars like Vietnam and World War II were a thing of the past given this new technological age. This assumption, like so many others, has proven to be wrong. The AIDS epidemic is not … [Read more...]

Fewer and fewer people I encounter have any idea what “Presbyterian” means. When, upon meeting someone, I am asked, “What do you do?” I usually say, “I am a Presbyterian pastor.” If they ask follow-up questions I go into more detail with words like “editor” or “religious magazine.” Most of the time all the person hears is “pastor” and then attaches to that whatever baggage they associate with the term. I confess – and this is a confession of sin – that I use the qualifier “Presbyterian” because, at least to me, it puts me in a category separate from television evangelists or fundamental literalists. To me, “Presbyterian” means educated, thoughtful and – yes, let me just speak it plain – intellectual and unlikely to hold up signs with “John 3:16” at the ballpark. (I told you this was a confession of sin.) I have come to understand, however, that “Presbyterian” does not carry those connotations for many anymore. I might as well skip the “Presbyterian” part and just say, “I am a … [Read more...]

I recently came across this quote attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still maintain the ability to function.” If Fitzgerald is correct, our current cultural ethos isn’t very smart. It stuns me to see, repeatedly, our collective inability to hold two or more ideas in tension. Our thinking (and our debate) is as gerrymandered as our voting districts, with extreme voices drowning out more nuanced sentiments. Even within church groups of mostly like-minded people, there is an increasingly narrow path that must be followed if one doesn’t want to be called out as disloyal, unfaithful or even anti-Christian. We are quick to judge one another’s righteousness, forgetting that none of us is without sin. James Davison Hunter, in his book, “To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World,” writes, “In public discourse, the challenge is … [Read more...]