‘Balcony time’ offers a fresh perspective
After metaphorically moving from the “dance floor” to the “balcony,” a pastor refocuses on personal connections with parishioners and priorities for the church.
Recently published
After metaphorically moving from the “dance floor” to the “balcony,” a pastor refocuses on personal connections with parishioners and priorities for the church.
In a new book, a professor of preaching offers a method of assessing a preacher’s context in order to faithfully address social issues without unnecessarily causing conflict.
The bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington preached to a nation at a crossroads with a call to faithful witness, writes a director of programs and grants for Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
A preacher’s main task is not to make a political stand but to preach the gospel by showing how God lives in the midst of human suffering, says the dean of Duke Chapel.
The preaching and leadership necessary for the church to fulfill its mission inevitably produces discomfort in the people and in their leader, writes the theologian and retired UMC bishop.
We’ve celebrated church as “family” without ever clarifying what kind of family we’re called to be, says an adoptive mother in this sermon. What kind of family is the church if not an adopted one?
This baptism that Jesus called us to is fundamentally a call for allegiance -- a “pickling” in the ways of Christ, the English pastor of the Chinese Christian Mission Church in Durham, North Carolina, says in this sermon.
In the aftermath of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, a homiletics professor and UMC pastor finds an important message in the parable of the vineyard owner’s son: Enough is enough. God did not mean for us to live this way.
Hundreds of people, like Peter, left the safety of the ship and threw themselves into the jaws of death to counter a rally of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, writes a pastor at First United Methodist Church Charlottesville.
Guns and gun violence may not be addressed in Scripture, but human dignity, the sanctity of life and other matters that speak to the issue and resonate with Christians’ core beliefs are, says the Union Theological Seminary homiletics professor.
In a heated political season, a seminary professor was eager to use a verse from James as an indictment of others. But what if he was the intended audience all along?