Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays (but then, come to think of it, so are Christmas and Easter and Pentecost and All Saints’ and . . .okay, so most of the Church’s other holy days are my favorites, too!) What I like about Thanksgiving is its appeal to the ordinary person, church and unchurched alike.  With Thanksgiving, you don’t have to understand, or explain, some complicated theological doctrine like the Incarnation as you do with Christmas.  Nor do you have to believe some absolutely incredible supernatural event like the Resurrection as with Easter.  No, anyone can … [Read more...]

As we pray and think about our giving to the church, I would like to share you with my own personal theology of giving.  The following statement was produced by United Methodist Communications and emailed to the 35,000 United Methodist churches in the United States.  So I thought I would pass it on to you. –John (Download also "Ten Steps In Giving" by Rev. John Wright) My Personal Theology of Giving I believe that life –that I am here at all— and God’s love come to me as a sheer gift from God.  It’s not owed to me, and I can’t earn it, much less “possess” it.  … [Read more...]

At my previous appointment, I was blessed to serve with an extraordinarily gifted young associate pastor, the Rev. Will Rice. Will is now pastor of discipleship at University United Methodist Church in San Antonio, the largest congregation in the Southwest Texas Conference.  At the time I served with him, Will was fairly new to church. In fact, he was new to Christianity. Often Will would end his sermon by giving the congregation an assignment to do. Or just before pronouncing the benediction, he would give the congregation something to do. At first, I had to stifle an impulse to tell … [Read more...]

Did you detect a bad odor wafting up from Corpus Christi last week?  Or the sweet aroma of the Spirit?  Or both? The Sunday before your pastors and lay delegates left for Annual Conference in Corpus Christi, I shared with the congregation the joke that Will Rogers liked to tell about Methodist preachers gathered for Annual Conference.  He once said, Methodist preachers are a lot like manure.  Spread ’em around, and they do a lot of good; but let ’em get piled up in one place, and they go to stinkin’. At the time I told it, I had no idea how true his words would turn out to be … [Read more...]

O Christ, your death means nothing unless we die to sin; your resurrection means nothing if you only have been raised. . . (Dr. Eric Milner-White, Dean of King’s College, Cambridge) I have longed meditated on this thought-provoking prayer.  It drives home the point that Good Friday and Easter must be more than mere observances of some historical event that happened long ago in the dead past. Good Friday must be the moment in which Christ’s death becomes present to us –the moment it happens for us and to us and in us here and now. If it doesn’t, there’s no point in … [Read more...]