On a Sunday morning not all that long ago, I stood behind a young mom and her toddler-aged daughter as they exited church. When they reached the doors in the back of our church, the mom said to her daughter, “Say good-bye to the church.”
The...
According to David Kinnaman in You Lost Me , 52 percent of youth group teens aspire to science-related careers but only one percent of youth workers have addressed issues of science in the past year.
Knowing this, I was excited when my student...
Recently, one of my new adult leaders asked me, “Why don’t we talk about the Holy Spirit more with our high school students? It seems like we’re very focused on Jesus.”
Truthfully, this is a pretty fair assessment of my high school ministry: It ...
I love to read. Among the books I love, there are a select few that have had a profound impact on my life and faith. Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel is one of them.
More than anything else, The Ragamuffin Gospel is a treatise on grace...
Earlier this year, I had the privilege of writing a piece on Sticky Faith – research that I very much admire and respect from Kara Powell and the folks at the College Transition Project - for The Christian Century.
A few weeks ago, Christian...
During our recent mission trip to the Quad Cities, our group attended the Backwater Gamblers waterskiing show. It was everything a small town show should be: Free, community-orientated, fun, and quirky.
My husband was enamored because some of...
One of my favorite pieces to play on the piano is Nocturne in C-sharp Minor by Frederic Chopin. One of the things I love about this piece is it's use of rubato, a technique in which certain notes are arbitrarily lengthened while others are...
The point at which I realized this school year was going to be a challenging year of ministry came even before it officially began.
It happened last August at a music conference I attended with several of my colleagues. Despite considering myself...
If you look at the teaching schedule for the last month of my high school ministry's program year, you'll see the following topics listed: War, gay marriage, and the question, “Who's a child of God?”
What each of these topics have in common is...
Google the musical, The Book of Mormon, and you'll almost certainly find people using the words “irreverent”, “crass”, and “ridiculously funny” to describe it. It's a show that uses wit and humor to explore faith and in particular, the Mormon...