the site of prayer for john.   I am John.     I have a mother. just like you.   I have a father. just like you.   I was born. I will die. naturally. when I’m 94.   I have a brother. his name is James.   I have another brother. sort of. his [...]

{I am going to post all the material that we used for the service over the next week and conclude with a post with links to all the separate posts.} Back in January, when I began to think about Lent and the lead up to Easter, a few ideas came to mind that I wanted [...]

I never really learned how to write until college. I mean I could write in high school, but I didn’t really understand how to respond to a topic or a piece of literature. I’m not sure why it clicked in college, maybe those freshmen english classes did work or maybe simply a couple of years [...]

Beauty. Art. Church. All things I have been thinking about for some years. For a long time I thought about them in very separate terms, then slowly the questions began to overlap and I started allowing them to dialogue with each other. Listening to questions about art and applying them to church or worries about [...]

I read a lot of books, some of them are really good, some not so much, some are informative or educational, but then some are just simply ruptures in thinking—this was what Dan Kimball‘s Emerging Worship was for me. It isn’t very new (published in 2004) and it isn’t a very complex or hard read [...]

Here are my thoughts/notes on our recent Ash Wednesday service. We came at it like we’ve doing the Vesper service. Vintage Fellowship hasn’t traditionally walked through the Lenten calendar, so we didn’t have any precedent to conform to. I used the liturgy from the 1979 Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer as a model to work from. [...]

I’m a slow in posting this, but here is some of the stuff from the February Vesper service. It went well, though it was mentally/emotionally difficult to get myself into it. It was a struggle from conception to production. Though I’m not sure exactly how well it came off, I was trying to create an [...]

So for Lent my faith community, Vintage Fellowship, decided to give up the technology related to our Sunday gatherings—this includes things like the projector, electric instruments, amplifiers, microphones, and the like. With this change we were able to do some unique things since we weren’t tethered to the power outlets. We moved things around in [...]

Here’s a collection of stuff related to vespers service as I know at least one or two of you will be interested in this stuff. For those who missed it, here’s a post introducing everything. Pictures and Video: Here is the media from the service. These pictures give a pretty good idea of how it [...]

For those who may not have heard, I am now officially an associate pastor at Vintage Fellowship. Well actually that isn’t my actual title, as we are still working one. ‘spiritual architect’ has been suggested; I like ‘practitioner in residence’ or something like ‘spiritual gardner’ but neither of us are sure about it. Though the whole idea [...]