These last couple weeks we’ve been wearing name tags during in-person worship services.  It’s good to remind each other who we are, or at least what our parents named us.  After living most of my life as the only Joel in the room, I now enjoy being one of several and so sign my tag “Joel M.”       One of the things about living in Zoom-land for the last two years is that nametags come with the package.  And not just name tags, but often name tags + something else.  Depending on what kind of call I’m on, I may include the name of the church after my name: “Joel Miller, Columbus Mennonite Church.”  This is the organization I’m affiliated with.  On advocacy calls, organizers regularly request that ordained clergy use our titles to add weight to our words.  So if I’m on a Zoom call with a senator or

We live, as some have observed, in an attention economy.  Attention, like time, is a limited resource.  Because where we direct our attention impacts what we buy, getting and keeping our attention is a key strategy for those with something to sell. Attention is also a spiritual resource.  It is essential for being in tune with ourselves and one of the greatest gifts – if not the greatest – we can give another person.  And we can tell, I can tell! when someone is or isn’t being attentive.     It’s hard to talk about attention without considering the role smart phones play in our lives.  I have come to accept these magic-in-the-pocket devices as part of life.  They can be pretty great.  But they are also probably my least favorite part about parenting… Can I get an Amen? I’ve come to realize that a key thing I want for my

The church camp I grew up going to every summer had a tradition that, in retrospect, was somewhat odd. One of the songs we regularly sang as part of mealtimes or worship services was the folk song “500 Miles.”  I always naively assumed this was just a camp song, and it wasn’t until much later in life that I realized it was more widely known and popularized by Peter, Paul, and Mary.  I say this was an odd tradition because it’s not a particularly “church-y” song.  Even so, I think it became so popular with us campers because it captured something about our experience of the week. The last verse of the song says: Not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my name Lord, I can’t go a-home this a-way. We would sometimes joke that after a week of camp, the lyric should be “Not a CLEAN

In the late 1700s the Russian leader Catherine the Great issued a decree inviting Europeans to come settle the newly conquered lands of the Russian Empire in present day Ukraine.  German speaking Mennonites answered the call.  They had previously fled persecution in the Netherlands and viewed this as an opportunity to build a self-sufficient community.  As pacifists they were also drawn by promised military exemption.  Mennonite colonies in Ukraine were built among the Nogais, semi-nomadic pastoralists who trace their lineage back to Genghis Khan.  It was a tense relationship at times and by 1860 the Nogais had either emigrated away or been deported.  Despite a wave of immigration to North America in the late 19th century, by 1914 Mennonites had established over 40 colonies in Ukraine and numbered 100,000 (Mennonite Church USA currently has around 62,000 members). World War 1 and the Russian Revolution that followed devastated these communities through

Tomorrow, February 18, is the one-year anniversary of Edith leaving sanctuary.  She lived in our church building for 40 months to avoid deportation.  She has been living with her family in Columbus and now has a work permit.     Last week a group of us accompanied Edith to an ICE check in (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).  She is under an order of supervision which includes sending ICE a monthly GPS-tagged picture through an app, and coming in person every four months.  It’s a common arrangement for folks without a secure status.  Edith was nervous because her ICE officer had not responded to her messages when Edith communicated she needed to go to Chicago to visit her mother who has stage 4 cancer.  As we learned, the officer has been on maternity leave and there was nothing amiss. Edith was relieved. She, her husband Manuel, and son Brandow, continue to work