So you’ve been talking with or saying hello to that person at church for months, or years, and you appreciate the relationship.  There’s just one thing slightly uncomfortable about it.  You have no clue what their name is, and now it’s to the point where it’s embarrassing to ask.  I know this about you because many of you have mentioned to me that you regularly have this experience. We put a high value on being community for each other, and we are blessed with enough of us hanging around in this congregation that it’s hard to remember names of more than just a close circle of relationships. You are not alone – and now help is on the way : ) In the spirit of building community, Gwen has been working hard to assemble a new CMC picture directory – with names!  It is completed and is waiting in your

Yesterday was St. Patrick’s day.  I forgot to wear green, but no one pinched me.  Like St. Valentine’s Day, or Christmas and Saint Nicholas, the lives of these saints are something akin to the background radiation from the big bang – still there if you really look for it, but certainly not the first thing you think of when you look around at what things have become.  Green beer, for example. St. Patrick lived in fifth century Britain and served as a slave in Ireland for six years, returning later in life to be the first bring the gospel to Ireland.  Two cool things about the Irish Christian tradition that St. Patrick initiated: + Ireland adopted Christianity while maintaining its reverence for creation from its pagan past.  It’s a positive example of Christianity bringing its unique contribution to a people, without a colonial effect of obliterating the traditional culture.  Celtic

Today I am in the Bluffton/Pandora area for a CDC pastors meeting and some work with the Ministerial Committee.  On the drive up here I listened to the TED Radio Hour episode “The Money Paradox.”  One of the featured speakers, Keith Chen, talked about his research on the relationship between financial savings practices and language.  As it turns out, people whose primary language does not differentiate between the present and future tense have a much higher (consistently 20-30%) savings rate than those whose language does.  English, for example, has a future tense: “I will drive home this afternoon and will see my children.”  Chinese and Finnish are examples of languages that don’t have a future tense.  “I drive home this afternoon and see my children.”  Chen’s theory is that, when it comes to how we manage our finances, there is a psychological advantage in not differentiating between the present self

Since being called to serve as a “Pastor of Christian Formation,” I often find myself thinking about the notion of formation.  How are we formed?  Who are we being formed to be?  In what ways is our formation either conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit?  What does Christian formation look like?  In the academic world, formation is often talked about in conjunction with something called habitus.  Habitus is a concept that goes all the way back as early as Aristotle but is often associated with the French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.  Different writers describe habitus with lots of nuance, but the general idea is that habitus represents the knowledge we acquire through our many diverse practices even though we might not be able to give an account of where that knowledge comes from.   More than just our “habits,” it is the knowledge we have in the depth of our bones.  It

There is a nice coincidence between this week’s worship theme, Land, and where we are at in the adult Sunday school study of the Gospel of Mark.  Next class we will pick up at Mark 4:35, when Jesus, having finished teaching in parables from the shores of the Sea of Galilee, tells his disciples, “Let us go to the other side.”  It is the first of five times (also 5:1,21; 6:45; 8:13) in the next four chapters that Mark utilizes that phrase, “the other side” – the popular teacher and healer whose entire ministry up to that point had taken place in his home region of Galilee, now shuttling back and forth across this wide lake which separated Jewish territory from that of the Gentiles.  During that span there are also two references to “crossing over” (5:21; 6:53) as well as a journey by foot across this border. Humans spend