Digital technology has triggered three transformations in how we communicate, or use our words. Each of these transformations in our words has significance for those called to preach the Word.

The Reverend Ranjit Mathews preaches because God has called him to prophetic and embodied witness to those with ears to hear. His vocation is to love extravagantly, and to invite the shedding from systems of white supremacy, purity culture, patriarchy, and the gospel of production. Let’s revisit his talk from our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.

Dr. Christine Hong usually mostly writes and teaches, instead of preaches, as a seminary professor. But after her writing and teaching slips into sermon mode, and she's mostly sorry about it, Christine mostly teaches and preaches to seminary students and their loved ones at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Christine preaches among an amazing group of colleagues and friends with the spirits of her ancestors.

Lent has recently become Dr. Michael J. Chan's favorite season in the church year. The 40 Lenten days commemorate Jesus' time in the wilderness, where he was tempted both by the devil and the harsh environment.

In order to grasp this great truth, the first thing we need to do is to get off our human high horse. We aren’t all that, especially when you compare us to the world of trees.

Jesus embodies a different kind of knowing, a different ministry and witness that comes with stiff social and economic penalties. His visions of an end to evil and dehumanizing systems so that all might flourish. Those were both popular and exceedingly disruptive.

It’s remarkable how many transformative words stay locked within the walls of our churches. Our messages are beautiful, life-changing, and somehow secret. Our ideas are available only to those who know our addresses and trust us enough to step inside.

Wesley preaches because the pitch, tone, words, cadence, movement, shifts, and emotion in the voice or expression is another way to communicate a finite witness to the infinite proposal of love from God found in Jesus Christ.

As we enter 2024, there is deep apprehension and fear about the pending presidential election this fall in the United States. How do we stay connected to our faith in such anxiety ridden times?

As someone who attaches a great deal of importance to words, it might surprise you that sometimes I find the things that mean most to me of all are things that I find hard to express with words.

A few years ago, I was charged with helping host, convene, and design a conference about Indian mass incarceration. Talking about the locked up bodies, black and brown, indigenous bodies in this country.

Funerals in the black community are often called home-going celebrations. The opportunity for the community to gather to celebrate the life of a loved one, family member, community leader, community person, an opportunity for us to gather and be in grief and celebration with one another.

What do we do with the memories that haunt us? That sneak up on us late at night.  And whisper words that cut quick to our core?

Recently, AI tools have given us the capacity to work with greater efficiency, to communicate with increased ease, to create digital content, and to give our communities the tools to tell their faith stories.  But just as important as improving or increasing our adoption of technologies is the church’s call to cultivate leadership for an accelerating world.

Theologians and practitioners have used the word “liminal space” or “liminal time” to describe these experiences. They are the point at which you become aware that a transition is about to occur. Liminal literally means, “threshold”. Think of walking through a doorway and going through/over a threshold. You are neither in one room nor the other; you are in-between. However you can see both, one behind and in front.

The message of the angel is as scandalous and striking now as it was then. For in it is embedded God’s message in the death and resurrection of Jesus: to trust and believe in the invincibility of the good in spite of the titanic reality of evil, because God is good all the time.

Home is a place, yes, but it's also a commitment, a demand that God's justice would unfurl here and now, a faith that expects to taste God's grace in the people and the places where God has planted us.  Home is a feeling and a commitment.

Be not conformed to this world, the Bible says, but be transformed by the renewing of your hearts. Or, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. What are those conforming things that we should be watching out for? What keeps us from freedom?

Theologians have a word for this kind of revealing, when something stark and dire and even painful occurs and reveals a deeper truth, something hidden in plain sight; it is called apocalypse. The word apocalypse includes the meaning “unveiling” or “disclosing”.