For this coming Sunday, September 30, the Pathways experience moves into the topic of Restoration and Commitment. We will begin with an assignment from the last class on “Sin, Truth-Telling and Repentance,” : When did you recognize sin (personal or systemic) straining...

Session Summary "Even as we affirm God’s love for us, we recognize the brokenness of our world — and of ourselves. The wholeness God desires for creation has been fractured by sin, both personal and systemic. Christ’s beloved church is not immune from sin. Our desire...

Deuteronomy 10: 17 For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. 18 He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving...

... will be the focus of the Pathways, Session 2 (September 16) Even as we affirm God’s love for us, we recognize the brokenness of our world — and of ourselves. The wholeness God desires for creation has been fractured by sin, both personal and systemic. Christ’s...

….is a study/discernment process for reflection, renewal and reporting by member churches of Mennonite Church USA, based on the three Renewed Commitments for MC USA. These were discerned from last summer’s (2017) Future Church Summit in Kansas City, MO. Those three...

 "My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…” Galatians 4:19 (When you read that the title of today’s message is “Christian FACE Formation,” that is no typo. By the time I’m done with this message, I hope we all...

In what has to be one of history’s most poignant, trenchant ironies, yesterday’s report from a grand jury in Pennsylvania about decades of sexual abuse by predatory priests, and of cover-ups in high ecclesiastical offices, was released on the same day that Roman...

If the Bible stopped at Daniel Chapter 11, we would not hear the songs that Bethel Mountain Band is going to sing. I don’t know what they’d sing about instead: maybe chicken soup or halibut fishing. Their next songs, however, are about eternal life, heaven, whatever...

I didn’t realize until this week that their graves are in the foreground every time I look out the window of my office toward Mt. Hood. But after reading about Edd and Alice Yoder in the recently-published book, In The Hollow of God’s Hand, by their granddaughter,...

You know about those parts of the Bible that are very hard to read, because they’re so full of details like Who begat who? and how this kind of sacrifice or ritual is to be carried out, and how that curtain is to be made and how many rings it is to hang from? So that...