My mentor, Len Sweet, wrote an introduction called “Garden, Park, Glen, Meadow” in his book The Church in Emerging Culture. I read this in my masters program (thanks Rick Bartlett). It has stuck with me as one of those forming metaphors. Noting that time changes and Christians change with it, but we change back to our origins. The garden here, is a fenced in enclosure. Something protected and kept safe. It is the protected piece and the piece where nothing changes. Think of i

Lord have mercy, I feel like this is something Christians senselessly argue about every single year. It’s stupid. But let’s try to shed some light and truth on it. Also, why my family and I will always celebrate Halloween. Halloween. A contraction; worn smooth by centuries of use, the way a stone in a riverbed gets worn smooth: of All Hallows' Even, the evening before All Hallows' Day. "Hallow" is simply the old English word for holy, the same root sitting quietly inside

"Just follow your heart." I've heard it so many times, whispered to graduates, printed on throw pillows, offered as the closing wisdom of a hundred movies right before the protagonist finally does the one thing they wanted to do all along. It sounds warm. It sounds like permission. And underneath it sits an assumption so deep in our culture that most people never question it: the heart is the seat of feeling, and feeling is where the truest version of you lives. Truer than yo

In the beginning, when our Father made mankind, they were naked and unashamed, and then they weren't, and everything since has been an attempt to get dressed. "And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed" (Genesis 2:25); the last sentence of the chapter before everything breaks. Notice that there is no hiding and no shame. No carefully managed version of themselves presented for approval. Just two people, fully seen, fully known, and somehow still fully safe

I'm a naturally curious person. I like to find things out, investigate, and dig into obscurity sometimes. I did this with AI recently. Not because I needed to or had some desire to make my writing something. But because I wanted to see what would happen. To be honest, I wasn't fully ready for the response I got. A few months ago I fed a machine about four years of my own writing. Sermons, blog posts, the odd half-finished thing I never published. Then I asked it for a paragra

I was asked to preach at a wedding a few years back, and the couple wanted Ephesians 5. Every pastor who's done more than a handful of weddings knows the particular flinch that request produces… half honor, half dread… because you know you're about to stand in front of a room that's heard this passage wielded as a leash far more often than they've heard it preached as love that empties itself to the point of death. You spend the drive over rehearsing how you're going to get t