Dear Church Family,  The world lost a bright light this week in Rachel Held Evans, a woman not much older than me, who died after a brief and mysterious illness. She was a voice for the millennials disenchanted by church, who nonetheless deeply desired the community of faith and who dreamed of a church where doubts were welcomed and where faith turned…

Dear Church Family, Christ is risen! As we contemplate the incredible mystery of Easter, and continue celebrating it through May and up to Pentecost, I want to make sure we talk about doubts. The Sunday after Easter is always the story of Doubting Thomas in the lectionary, but I’ll be going off-schedule this Sunday when I preach, so I thought it good…

Dear Church Family, Spring is springing up all around us and the Lenten days are lengthening as we approach a late Easter. This year Easter falls on Earth Day, a lovely coincidence for ecotheologians, and so as we approach Palm Sunday and the pathos of Holy Week, I’d like to invite you to mourn with the earth. As we walk with Jesus…

Dear Church Family, I’m back and grateful for your prayers. As they wheeled my mother into her surgery at Manhattan Sloan Kettering the nurse encouraged her saying, “don’t you remember you have eleven churches praying for you?” That’s one of the perks of her being a well-connected Presbyterian pastor with nearly forty years of service before her retirement (and a year or…

Dear Church Family, Yesterday I spent a lot of time at a Presbytery meeting along with other people from our congregation and the congregations of the SF bay area. While there, I got to share the good news that we have 29 people registered to go to the Presbyterian Youth Triennium this year. Now, that doesn’t mean 29 people from MPC, but…

Dear Church Family, Our church leadership retreat last fall gave us (pastors and Session) a lot of material to think about and mull over. One inspiration that came out of the retreat was talking about our spiritual needs and how we can help meet those needs for others. Aha, I said, there’s a Contact piece in that idea. I’ve done a lot…

Dear church family, Happy New Year! I hope that your celebrations were joyful. On New Year’s Eve my family and I changed all the clocks in the house so we could count down to “midnight” on some vaguely Nova Scotian time, and bade good riddance to 2018 early. We are hopeful for 2019, we have found out that our mother’s cancer is…

Dear church family, Thank you all for the thoughts and prayers and questions about my mom… and for all you did while I was away visiting her (especially the amazing youth group advisors, who ran a huge youth party in my absence!) Here’s the scoop: she has good days and bad days, varying weekly with her chemo schedule, but lucky for me…

Two weeks ago, last time it was my turn to write for Contact, I couldn’t write on Tuesday, like I usually do, because I was waiting to see how the election results came out. I couldn’t bring myself to write about an event that hadn’t happened yet, or to prepare two different versions of the same thing, for publication based on how…

Dear church family, How are you doing? I know many of us were anxiously working for campaigns, working the polls, and/or staying up late watching the election returns come in. How are you doing today? Voter turnout was tremendous, races were tight, and families were divided against one another. Some hoped for an enormous “blue wave” and are lamenting today. Others had…