Our worship series on healthy sexuality wrapped up at the end of October.  If you missed any of those services, you can find the sermons posted on our website.  While that series was going, the High School Sunday School class was using a companion curriculum to explore the same themes that were being explored during worship.  For the last Sunday in the series, I wanted to figure out some way to bring everything back together and help the class reflect on everything we had talked about with an eye toward a bigger picture of healthy sexuality.  What I came up with is my own take on an “Abstinence Pledge.”  Rather than just trying to coerce the class into signing a pledge that simply promises they will not have sex before marriage, I wanted to reclaim the idea of abstinence by challenging them to think more deeply about their values and

This is not satire or cynicism: Thank you taxpayers.  For the last few months I’ve been watching with glee as construction crews do their thing at a heavily traveled interchange, now nearly complete.  The improvement involves a new walk/run/bike access point to the Olentangy Trail, beginning on the north side of the Olentangy River Rd/Bethel Rd intersection, running east over a newly dedicated bike lane on the Bethel Rd bridge over Route 315, curving down and around through a newly installed culvert under the northbound on ramp to Route 315 leading directly onto the trail.  If that’s hard to picture, you’ll have to come take a look yourself.  As someone who just moved a half mile from that intersection, who likes to run and commute by bike to church as much as I’m able, it feels like a personal gift.  For me?  Thank you!  It cuts a 5.5 mile commute

This Sunday concludes our four week Healthy Sexuality worship series.  We’ll focus on the ways sexuality and spirituality are related as energies of connection.  In case you missed any of the first three sermons and follow up reflections, here they are: Our bodies, God’s image (Pro)Creative intimacy Healthy sex: Drawing the line(s) If you’d like to do more reading, or listening, on your own, here are four options Mark and I recommend: Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Margaret A. Farley Written by a Catholic feminist, this book provides a broad overview of historical, multi-cultural, and Christian approaches to sexual ethics and develops its own framework around sexuality and justice.  The book is academic but accessibly written. In a later section she builds out seven “Norms for Just Sex.”  1) Do no unjust harm 2) Free Consent 3) Mutuality 4) Equality 5) Commitment 6) Fruitfulness 7) Social

Yesterday morning Presidential candidate Julian Castro visited Edith at our church.  He met with her privately for about 20 minutes, listening to her story, followed by a press conference at which Edith and he spoke.  He expressed his support for Edith and his commitment to families in similar circumstances.  Local and national press showed up.  So did lots of you.  A strong showing of people old and young (who got to miss some school) declared by their presence that we stand with Edith.  The Dispatch covered the event, as did ABC6, Religion News Service, and several other outlets. A candidate for the most powerful office in the world visiting our sanctuary is cause for pause.  After the main press conference, as people trickled back to where they needed to be that day, Secretary Castro continued speaking with the press.  I snapped this photo which I feel captures some of the

This Friday, October 11, is National Coming Out Day.  The idea of “coming out” has an interesting history that has shifted over time.  The more prevalent understanding for today is built around the idea of “coming out of the closet” where the closet represents a hidden, secretive place from which one emerges when the time is right. But there is an older understanding of “coming out” that is not connected with the idea of a closet as a shameful, secretive place of existence.  Before there was the closet, coming out meant that a person was being presented to a community of peers.  In a manner similar to the tradition of debutante balls, gay people would “come out” to other gay people as a way of being welcomed into the community.  With this understanding, you were not necessarily keeping your identity a secret before you decided to come out, because the