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Holy Subversives

July 2015

I finally got around to watching The Butler, in which Forest Whitaker plays the fictionalized role of Eugene Allen, a White House butler who served eight U.S. presidents, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. An African-American, Allen stood at the edge of the room as President Kennedy discussed with his brother Bobby when to send federal troops to force integration in the South, and as Lyndon Johnson and his aides (often with Johnson sitting on the toilet) debated the political ...

You Gotta Start Somewhere

June 2015

I know William Willimon as an outstanding preacher as well as a professor and chaplain at Duke University. In this vignette, he gives an account of two elderly women who made a wrong turn into a sketchy part of town and proceeded to invite a most unlikely guest to their suburban church service. Verleen lived with her children in the projects and had never been to a church in her life, but she accepted the invitation of the two women, ...

Word Power

May 2015

As a child I would hear my mother and other adults use a secret code in my presence: for example, “I think we’ll stop for some i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m for the boys.” Again and again I heard that code: strange word gaps in a sentence replaced by short nonsense sounds that somehow made sense when linked together—made sense to adults anyway. Books used the same code. I would look at the pictures, pointing to them in glee as a story I knew came ...

Small is Large

April 2015

I visited a local megachurch recently. My friend described it as, “You know, one of those big-box churches with one-word names, super-loud music, huge video screens, and long sermons.” Currently, 1300 U.S. congregations qualify as megachurches, averaging more than 2000 in weekly attendance. The one I visited has more parking-lot volunteers than my church has members. I’ll say one thing for megachurches: they can afford quality. The sermon was both entertaining and insightful, the super-loud music flawless (I declined the earplugs ...

A Dispenser of Grace

March 2015

In Vanishing Grace I describe people I call grace-dispensers. You don’t have to be a professional, or educated, or especially skilled, to be a good grace-dispenser. A new book by John Ortberg, the pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California, tells of an ordinary woman in San Francisco who makes an extraordinary dispenser of grace. I’ll let John tell this story as a guest columnist: … There was a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a metro-transit ...

Blog Posts

Holy Subversives

You Gotta Start Somewhere

Word Power

Small is Large

A Dispenser of Grace