It’s a good time to remember what has already been accomplished by God, to declare publicly what is universally and uniquely and unconditionally true, and to practice carrying promises as a community instead of fending only for ourselves.

Everything is different now. I returned home to find this occupation is cruel and pervasive and completely disorienting. And. I returned home to find the resolve of our community familiar and fierce. Steady like salt. Huddled for warmth. Lighting the way. 

Each week, we’ll offer a curated selection of blog posts that speak to the upcoming lectionary texts to help spark your imagination and serve as a thought partner for you. We hope these musings meet you right where you are with a fresh, bold, and faithful witness.

Resources for Right Now is a living resource crafted amid the January 2026 escalation of violent immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In this collection, we hope to equip the church’s leaders with diverse ways to speak into this moment, in sermon prompts, short illustrative stories, songs new and old, and liturgy and prayers. 

Each week, we’ll offer a curated selection of blog posts that speak to the upcoming lectionary texts to help spark your imagination and serve as a thought partner for you. We hope these musings meet you right where you are with a fresh, bold, and faithful witness.

Each week, we’ll offer a curated selection of blog posts that speak to the upcoming lectionary texts to help spark your imagination and serve as a thought partner for you. We hope these musings meet you right where you are with a fresh, bold, and faithful witness. 

Revelation cuts both ways. It comforts the vulnerable and indicts the powerful. It saves some and judges others—not because God changes, but because people respond differently when the truth is made visible. You cannot unleash chaos on communities, terrorize people in broad daylight, and then claim innocence when fear and resistance follow. You do not get to be both the author of violence and its victim.

Each week we at Church Anew provide you with Lectionary Musings, a collection of previous posts related to the lectionary texts for the coming Sundays and feast days. This post is not that. This post is for my fellow ministers and church leaders staring down Sunday and wondering: How do I lead in a time like this?

If this makes you uncomfortable, good. Let that discomfort move you toward action, toward solidarity, toward truth. This is not a moment to look away.

Psalm 88 ends with a sentence no one has ever cross-stitched onto a pillow: “Darkness is my closest friend.” And yet… the ancient community kept this psalm. They copied it. Prayed it. Sang it. Preserved it as Scripture. Why?

Each week, we’ll offer a curated selection of blog posts that speak to the upcoming lectionary texts to help spark your imagination and serve as a thought partner for you. We hope these musings meet you right where you are with a fresh, bold, and faithful witness. 

Since the summer, I’ve been accompanying immigrants on many Fridays to their initial asylum hearings in New York City, watching as judges decide people’s fates while ICE agents loom over and harass asylum seekers at every turn. That experience has led me to hear the Christmas story with different ears this year – namely, as Good News proclaimed to people living on the edge of an abyss.

Each week, we’ll offer a curated selection of blog posts that speak to the upcoming lectionary texts to help spark your imagination and serve as a thought partner for you. We hope these musings meet you right where you are with a fresh, bold, and faithful witness. 

There is so much life and evidence of creativity in the space left behind when they tore down the building. The large green space now has the potential to become a park, or a field for kids to play soccer, or a sculpture garden, or a home for a new family, or space for birds to fly, or…

Each week, we’ll offer a curated selection of blog posts that speak to the upcoming lectionary texts to help spark your imagination and serve as a thought partner for you. We hope these musings meet you right where you are with a fresh, bold, and faithful witness. 

Octavia Butler and Mary the mother of Jesus both show us that love in the midst of chaos is not naïve; it is revolutionary. It is courageous. It is, quite literally, a world-making force.

For many of us shaped by immigrant families or marginalized communities, this Mary feels familiar. She looks like our abuelas—complicated, courageous, caught between survival and hope. Women who resist in their own quiet ways while also carrying the weight of harmful narratives they inherited. Women whose faith is not perfect, but persistent.

Perhaps there were adults too,
She suggests,
But in the agrarian societies
Of the First Century,
Much like in agrarian societies of today –
One of the first jobs
Of children
Was to tend the sheep and the goats
Out in the fields –
Like David
Of old.
The.
Shepherds.
Were.
Children.

Each week, we’ll offer a curated selection of blog posts that speak to the upcoming lectionary texts to help spark your imagination and serve as a thought partner for you. We hope these musings meet you right where you are with a fresh, bold, and faithful witness. 

When I’m coaching, it’s not about me or my ministry. And since I’ve been bearing witness to Sandy’s ministry all year, through these sessions, site visits and engagement with her congregational leaders, I have a robust sense of why her ministry is fantastic. I could ask, “Why did you want everything about your ministry to change?” But I don’t. Instead, I just listen because coaching might be the only place Sandy gets to name these things aloud so she can hear them, share them, and loosen some of their power.