Preaching

I had been a priest for fifteen months, and was visiting my old friend Joe Doss who’d just recently been made the rector at Grace Church. New Year’s Day 1974. He asked me to preach and preside at a New Year’s Day/Holy Name of Jesus liturgy in the Grace Church’s chapel. I was hurting and confused. My marriage was coming apart and in dark moments I counted myself a failure as a priest and as human being. So I was deeply grateful for my friend’s invitation to preside... Read more about A Breath of Fresh Air

I was folding laundry. My wife, international programs director of an NGO doing AIDS work in Africa, Ph.D. trained gerontologist, amateur actor, mother of three splendid grown children and stepmother to another splendid grown child, does her best to avoid using the dryer. Read more about You are love

When a St. Gregory’s preacher invites people to share experiences that the sermon stirred up, people speak from their hearts.

But when I began noticing how people seemed to avoid explicitly Christian language and that any mention of “God” was tentative or gently ironic, I began to wonder whether our preaching was taking the Christian faith out of our practice. Are Christian prayer and faith—“knowing Jesus” or “being in Christ"-- simply verbal or intellectual interpretations we impose on experience? I am grateful to the College of Preachers for a fellowship that allowed me to begin working on those questions in early 1998.During that month and a half of writing and reading, I asked the people of St. Gregory’s to send notes about how we hold Jesus and what makes our congregation Christian. Read more about Preaching at St. Gregory’s