Category: incarnation
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Hospital Notes #1: You’re a bigger deal than you think.
I state my esteem for you because I believe that we too, even as strangers, can participate in the love-life of all things, the center of the universe, God, whenever we love.
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The Gospel is God’s Spell
The origin of the word “gospel” is just like it sounds. The Gospel is “God’s spell.” In Old English, before it took on it’s more magical connotations, “spell” meant simply “story.” In my experience the Gospel has not failed to correspond with its later enchanted associations. This is probably because stories are, in their essence,…
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How Jesus Says “Woman”
John 2:1-11 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what…
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Knowing the Good
South Jersey Mutual Aid in Pennsauken’s 1000th delivery celebration When the South Jersey Mutual Aid in Pennsauken Compassion Team gathered to celebrate their 1000th delivery last week I led them in a ritual of naming the Good. Of course we know the work we are doing is good. We organized with the wider South Jersey…
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We Know More Than We Comprehend
I was on retreat trying not to question my instincts too much, because retreats are basically practice for listening to the Spirit and your instincts and the Spirit often sound the same. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” came to mind. I’m a big Gerard Manley Hopkins fan and there are kingfishers on…
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Nobody Wants to Deny the Flesh: Audre Lorde and Jesus on the Erotic
Learning new things at Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee and Books I went to a book reading at Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee and Books in Germantown, Philadelphia last month. Adrienne Maree Brown was reading from her new book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. It was a fascinating time with a very diverse crowd of people. I…
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Why Bother Being One Church in Four Locations?
One of the most ambitious things Circle of Hope does is stick together across our wide region. We are one church in four locations. From Suburban New Jersey, all over Philadelphia, and into the Pennsylvania suburbs. We are not multi-site in the way that many churches have been trending. No pastors get beamed from one…
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People are better than ideas
People change people, much more than ideas do. The best way to bridge divides is bringing people who are different from one another together in love. An idea is a powerful tool; but it is limited, I think, to political power. Jesus was most interested in people’s allegiance to him as a person not to…
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Giving Thanks for Friends We Don’t See As Much As We Used To
Recently I got a group of people together who had been planting the church together for ten years. Our congregation in South Jersey is ten years old (What a wonder!), and we marked the occasion with a time to remember where we have been and consider where we are going. The time reminded me of…
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Drake, Richard Rohr, and Sex
I’m a bigger fan of Richard Rohr than I am of Drake, but when you beat Beyoncé in record sales I pay attention. Drake did that this weekend while I was talking about sex at the Sunday Meeting, and the kids in my cell that meets in a Pizza Shop in Woodlynne on Friday afternoons…
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“Keeping it on Chop” or NOT committing…ever
I may be on the cusp of a linguistic breakthrough because I was hanging out with teenagers yesterday and one said that she and this guy were “keeping it on chop.” She sad her friend had used that phrase to describe a relationship status akin to “just talking.” I looked up the phrase on urban…
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Jesus, My Twin
I was so moved by the documentary “Twinsters” I needed to tell you about it. “Twinsters” is the story of two identical twins who were born together in South Korea but quickly separated and adopted by parents in different countries, and how they find each other through the internet. Samantha Futerman, the twin protaganista and…
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A Week of Being Jesus
In Circle of Hope we say Jesus is best revealed incarnationally- Here’s a little newspaper of how that worked out for me this past week (spoiler- it did!) Monday Afternoon– When the Compassion Core Team heard about the #ReclaimMLK march happening in Philadelphia they mobilized 200 people from Circle of Hope to show up and…
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Welcome, Jesus, to the world and South Jersey
We really got ourselves into a mess recently at Circle of Hope. God afflicted us with this surprising idea to shift our church planting staff around. Nate Hulfish is moving into an Adminstrator/Communicator role for the whole church and I am moving into the role of Pastor of Marlton and Crescent. I never would have…
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Do what you can now, rather than what you should never
Last night we gathered in Germantown with some folks who were new to Circle of Hope. We were casting the vision and inviting them into partnership in our work for God’s redemption project. Our goal is to create an environment where people can connect with God and act for redemption. This is unique. we cultivate…
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Holy Mischief at Philadelphia University
It’s the first week of school! Everyone’s got their new sneakers on and they’re trying to figure out where they fit in at a lot of the university campuses. I’m hoping that some of them will fit in with us at Circle of Hope so I went to University of the Sciences and Philadelphia University…
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Trying to be question marks on July 4th
When you wear a sandwich sign some people will yell across a crowd to you. I learned this and a lot of other things at the Party on the Parkway on July 4th, this past Thursday. The first person to yell across the crowd got my attention by reciting what he had memorized of the…
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“Good Morning” means something… I hope
I stood outside in the rain today for an hour to see who would talk to me. Between 8 and 9 in the morning, especially when it isn’t raining but even when it is, South Broad Street’s sidewalk is a river of people streaming to work. This morning, the bells of St. Rita’s started and…
Today, if you hear his voice 