PCUSA

Welcome to the New Year, from the Valley

1 Comment / PCUSA, Personal, The Church in Exile / By /

My family and I made an excursion to Death Valley National Park this week. Home to the lowest elevation spot in the Western Hemisphere—Badwater Basin—Death Valley in the summer is unbearably hot and dry (routinely 120° during the day, “cooling down” to 100° at night). We chose the wiser course and journeyed down during the last week of December. Theoretically, the average temperature in December is 65°, but during our stay the temperatures hovered in the mid-50s during the day, going down to the mid-30s at night. The wind howled, blowing sand and dust everywhere. We came home two days […]

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Can a Christian Be a Fair and Impartial Juror?

Leave a Comment / Citizenship, PCUSA, Personal, Theological Reflection / By /

My husband and I have been hugely entertained and encouraged by the messages received in response to yesterday’s non-rhetorical question: What if a trial attorney were to ask you, “Pastor, would you be willing to put aside your Christian faith in order to be a fair and impartial juror?” My blog today could quote them all and fill this page, and I may still before the day is over. But the question itself deserves and requires some consideration simply for what it says about our culture. Part 1: Would I be willing to put aside my Christian faith? I first

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Discipline for Our Own Good

1 Comment / GAPJC Decisions, It All Started in the Garden, PCUSA, Personal, Spiritual Disciplines / By /

Quite often I find myself asking the question, “How did things get this way?” particularly in reference to my tribe, the PC(USA), but also to the culture developing around us all. It is safe to say that we are shaped over time, individually and corporately. The way things are now is the result of decades of shaping mechanisms at work in and among us. You could say the same for any culture anywhere in the world, but my experience limits my thinking to American culture. This weekend I had a chance to air my brains out as I breathed in

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Is There Anything “New” under the Sun?—Part II

2 Comments / It All Started in the Garden, PCUSA, Sermon on the Mount, Spiritual Disciplines, The Missional Church, Theological Reflection / By /

Yesterday we considered the human drive toward newness. The writer of Ecclesiastes helped us to see that “under the sun,” that is, in the realm of purely human experience, there is nothing really new. People think they’ve found something new to entertain, feed an addiction, or eat; but chances are pretty good that even a primitive form of that thing has been around for a very long time. To this restless searching, God—through the voice of Isaiah—asks the pertinent question: Why do we waste our money on stuff that does not satisfy (53:2)? God implanted in human DNA a yearning

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Is There Anything “New” under the Sun?—Part I

6 Comments / Death & Dying, It All Started in the Garden, PCUSA, Spiritual Disciplines, Teaching, Theological Reflection / By /

[Got sidetracked yesterday, first with Jury Duty and then with the Giants-Pirates wildcard match-up last night. Okay, I am back in focus!] In my last post, I suggested that just because something is new or experimental, it does not necessarily follow that it is good or orthodox. The catalyst for my comments was an “outside the box” worship service conducted during the last meeting of San Francisco Presbytery.  It makes sense now to explore whether the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and other historic mainline denominations have fallen off the deep end in their efforts to try something new. The motivation, it

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What Sort of “New” Is Acceptable in the PC(USA)?

10 Comments / 2012th General Assembly (Pittsburgh), 221st General Assembly (2014), Essential Tenets of the Reformed Faith, GAPJC Decisions, Parnell v. San Francisco, PCUSA, Spiritual Disciplines, Teaching, The Missional Church / By /

One of the first things a counselor (of any type) will tell you is that if you want to change a behavior, the best place to start is by monitoring what your current behavior is. If you want to change your eating habits, for instance, you would keep a food log for a couple weeks to observe what you are actually putting in your mouth. Then when it is time to start the behavioral change project, you know where your points of vulnerability are, you know how much of a change is required, and you get a pretty good idea

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Is Creativity Allowed in Presbyterian Worship?

4 Comments / Current Events, Leadership and Spirituality, PCUSA, Personal, Spiritual Disciplines / By /

Every fiber of my Reformed body cringed during my presbytery’s worship time two weeks ago, described in yesterday’s post. Among people who should have known better, what we did together was not worship. It certainly was an experience—I’ll grant you that—but because it dwelled on ourselves and our experience of our bodies and never even acknowledged God’s presence, it was nothing like what you would call Reformed Worship. In the note I finally received yesterday from our executive presbyter, Jeff Hutcheson acknowledged that the service was “outside the box,” but shared his own spiritual experience through it as significant and

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The Misdirection of Worship: A Case in Point

8 Comments / 2012th General Assembly (Pittsburgh), 221st General Assembly (2014), Leadership and Spirituality, PCUSA, Peace Unity & Purity, Personal / By /

Lest one thinks that idolatrous worship was a problem only eons ago, as illustrated in yesterday’s post, even today within the PC(USA) it is possible to find events promoted as worship experiences that are anything but. A case in point: the after-dinner “worship” on the agenda of San Francisco Presbytery’s regular meeting of September 9. The “Order of Worship” handed out to us as we entered the sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church of Oakland consisted of the following elements: a call to worship, opening song, Scripture exploration, Communion & Community Prayer, Announcements, Closing Song, and Benediction. The experience unfolded in

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“Hot Off the Press”: One Way to Organize Sensitive Discussions on World Topics

3 Comments / Current Events, History, PCUSA, Teaching, Theological Reflection / By /

In earlier posts, found here and here, I shared a couple of methods for generating discussion on topics needing theological reflection. I used 4-MAT and Case Studies often in the Fuller Seminary classes I taught. Versions of both have been helpful in the church Sunday school context, but I fell upon a less formal approach that got excellent traction in the last church I served. Years ago, I started an adult Sunday school class we called “Hot Off the Press.” The idea was to engage in discussion of world and national events from a faith perspective. My agenda was to

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Unspeakable Sadness

3 Comments / 221st General Assembly (2014), Current Events, Death & Dying, Lung Cancer, PCUSA, Personal, Theological Reflection / By /

Going back to my original list of reasons for not blogging this summer, today I address the experience of sadness. Several things piled on over time and rendered me still before God, downcast in spirit: • my mother’s death after a sudden and short illness, in early April • the developing news of my friend Steve Hayner’s pancreatic cancer • actions of General Assembly, particularly regarding same-sex marriage • the beheading of innocents at the hands of ISIS • the escalating death toll due to Ebola in West Africa • devastating wildfires in California, at or near some of my

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