What neighborhood, out of all the ones you’ve lived in, has been your favorite? Was it a quiet small town street lined with tall trees? Was it a bustling corner of a large, noisy city? Was it a distant, rural farm, the air scratched with the clucking of chickens? Was it a small cottage on the edge of the windy
Are you content to have unfulfilled needs in your life? Most of us aren’t. We want enough for today, plus extra stored away for the future. Yet our longing for more than enough is often limited to what we can see and touch. Jesus told us that these things would never satisfy. He taught that only God can fulfill our
But such things apply to Joy, if at all, in a far diminished way. I sing the Lord’s Prayer to her, but she’ll never learn to pray. We’ll bring her to church, but she’ll never learn the basics of the faith. We’ll take care of her physically, but to what extent can we really meet her spiritual needs?
Recently Wesleyan Accent spoke with Dr. Aaron Perry on Leadership in the Wesleyan Way, a volume he edited with Dr. Bryan Easley. Wesleyan Accent: This summer, you and Bryan Easley published a 450-page collection of essays on “Leadership the Wesleyan Way: An Anthology for Forming Leaders in Wesleyan Thought and Practice.” It’s been praised by notable voices like Dr. Jo
A Note From The Editor: Recently Wesleyan Accent posed a couple of questions to pastors and their spouses about how they pray for their children while in ministry, and how they choose to shape their kids’ experience of vocational ministry. Here are their responses. Elizabeth Glass Turner Wesleyan Accent: What are some ways you prayed for your children while
Right before I turned 14, my narrow little view of the world was rocked. The U.S. had just declared war on Iraq. I wasn’t so afraid of a war on the other side of the world as I was of the implications of this war. “Armageddon,” “World War III, “and “Christ’s return,” were just a few of the words swirling
One month ago, an American couple herded three children into a men’s room in the Istanbul, Turkey airport. The wife visibly pregnant, they settled in for the night and texted to family members in the U.S., letting them know that their flight was being delayed indefinitely – keeping some of the details to themselves. All night the parents kept vigil
I’m going to call Martha’s the honest approach. She doesn’t stand back and say things like, “Well you must have needed another angel.” Or “It must have been your will.” She looks him right in the eye and tells him exactly what she is thinking. “You let me down. You did not do what I asked you to do. You
let’s look closer at the story of Babel. The first thing we learn is that there was only one language and one people – “now the whole earth had one language and the same words” – that ought to be a red flag for us. It ought to alert us that something isn’t right.
It is a season to weed and to water and to pluck from the vine. We are in the midst of Ordinary Time on the liturgical calendar – between Pentecost and Advent, “ordinary” sounds mundane. But if it is mundane, it can also be the beautiful kind of mundane, like a long-married couple sharing their morning coffee or a gardener
It seems, then, that God would not want anything bad to happen in the world, and he certainly has the power to stop them from happening. Yet bad things—unimaginably horrific things—happen every day. Over many centuries, philosophers and theologians have attempted to solve this problem by explaining why God would choose to create a world like ours, where humans
Today is April 16. Every year I write something in memory of my Mama Sarah and in honor of my mom, Maxine Stoddard. On this day 37 years ago, my Mama Sarah was murdered by my biological father; at that point, many lives were forever changed. She was murdered on my mom’s birthday (April 16) and buried on mine (April 18). You can read
The promise is not that we would be safe but that we would be faithful. The angel of God does not always spare us from tragedy or troubles, but enables us to look at tragedy troubles through different eyes.
I find myself walking in the semi-dark, friends clustered around me. Our hands are full, carrying materials to preserve a corpse. It was a long Sabbath. We were supposed to rest, so we did. But there’s no rest from thoughts of despair and grief. They follow you into every room you enter. Like we had followed Him. We saw the
We must be honest about our failures and sins. None of us lives up to the standards our faith demands. But this doesn’t mean we cease wrestling with and proclaiming the Word.
Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and
I confess that I don’t know that much about adoption. I used to tell my little brother that he was adopted—from the animal shelter. I have reaped the consequences of this in my own sons, as the generational dysfunction marches on. I remember lying in bed as an angsty teen, wondering what it would feel like to be chosen, wanted,
What makes us think we can make such an audacious request? The resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Believing in a miracle, a rationally unexplainable occurrence, takes exactly what Tillich describes–a faith that transcends our comprehension without excluding our consciousness. In other words, we should know what we are asking for but not expect the miracle to come in ways we can
A proposed pipeline in my community has caused me to consider the nature of Christian faith and our lives as disciples. I’m not talking about the political, economic or environmental ramifications of pipelines, but the pros and cons of using the analogy of the Christian way of life, our discipleship, as a pipeline. On one hand, the idea of having
The mystery that surrounds us belongs to different modes of perception. That is why he said, “The heart has reasons the mind knows not of.” It is the heart that is able to see into that mystery. And it is why Paul said to the Ephesians, “I pray that God will enlighten the eyes of your heart, so you may
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