As we conclude this year-long experiment in respectful conversations, I’m grateful for the ways my faithful beloveds have responded to the post about my adopted tradition, Pentecostalism. Throughout the Following Jesus conversations, I’ve been struck by how many posts have included stories, highlighting the lived experience of our respective traditions. This set of responses was […]
Bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name, one Sunday I tarried at the altar, a classical Pentecostal phrase that involves praying mightily for a divine encounter with the Holy Spirit. I stood, along with others, near the front of the worship space, my body enveloped by the band’s percussive rhythms and the praise […]
It’s a true honor to respond to prominent LDS scholar Robert Millet, dean emeritus of religious education at Brigham Young University, the flagship of LDS higher education. Dr. Millett has spent decades explaining the faith to Latter-day Saints themselves, as well as patiently representing LDS beliefs and practices to those on the outside. I appreciate […]
When I’m asked to respond to a scholar-practitioner of black church life, my first inclination is to sit down, shut up, listen carefully, and to ask: What is it that I need to learn, as a white Christian? What do I need to see, to hear, to change, as someone who strives to be in […]
If Pietists and Pentecostals are like cousins, then certainly Pentecostals and Methodists are even closer in family formation. After all, it was the revivalist Wesleyan movement, blended with a dose of Moravian Pietism, that gave birth to Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal forms of Christian faith and practice. In the United States by the early 20th […]
Hello, cousin! That’s the first thing that came to mind when I read this month’s “A Week in the Life of a Pietist,” by Christopher Gehrz. Too few scholars have drawn attention to the deep affinities between Pietism and Pentecostalism, and to Pietism’s influence on Pentecostal faith and practice. Pentecostalism has a complex root system […]
My mother grew up a Southern Baptist. She was born a stone’s throw from the small clapboard church in Shiloh, Tennessee, where she first met the Lord and learned the hymns she sang throughout her life: Tell Me the Story of Jesus, I Love to Tell the Story, and In the Garden. Each one of […]
Dr. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson writes with such clarity, humility, and tenderness about his adopted Reformed tradition that in reading the post I thought, for a second, maybe this is the way to follow Jesus. After all, conversion – taking up a different Christian expression – has emerged as a leitmotiv in these Respectful Conversations. Quite a […]
I once met a retired Ugandan Anglican Bishop by the name of Christopher Ssenyonjo. Bishop Ssenyonjo was (and remains) an outspoken advocate of LGBTQI equality in Ugandan civil society and in the Church of Uganda. He founded Integrity Uganda, an organization that advocates for the full inclusion of LGBTQ Christians in Anglican church life. Bishop […]
When Mennonites, Amish and other Anabaptists are considered in historical perspective, they are classified as radical reformers, a family of dissidents whose relentless criticisms of both church and state shaped an ekklesia that looked nothing like the late medieval Latin church, nor the developing alternatives offered by Lutheran or Reformed Protestants. It was this Anabaptist […]
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