“Jesus didn’t have members, so why do churches?” I remember showing up to pastor my first church (in my early twenties) and someone asked me this question. A debate was going on in the church about membership. Should a church have members? It makes the church sound like a country club, where there are insiders and outsiders, those with special privileges, and those without them. One of my first jo...  Read More

I love to ask new people, “How did you find The Gathering?” This past week at NEXT (our monthly event for people to learn more about the church), I asked just that. One young woman who moved to St. Louis just last week was there and told me her story. She lived in Alabama and struggled to ever connect with a church that felt like home. Her mother, who also lives in a very small town in southern Mi...  Read More

This past week has felt strange for me. With new CDC guidelines, every place I go I am wondering what I should be doing. In most settings, I have been wearing my mask, partly out of habit, and partly out of a sense of hospitality to those around me. It isn’t always clear what to do in each setting I am in. All of us are going through this right now. Trying to figure out what we should do, what we ...  Read More

Last week, the CDC released updated guidelines for fully-vaccinated people which no longer require masks or social distancing (except in certain situations). This was prompted by evolving scientific evidence that fully-vaccinated people are at minimal risk of infection or transmission of the virus. In response to this news, St. Louis City and County also dropped local mask and social distancing re...  Read More

In 4th grade, I had a Sunday School teacher named Ms. Novak. The church in which I grew up predated the Civil War, and the small upper room that we met in looked like it. Old, a bit spooky, and not much larger than a closet – but every Sunday, Ms. Novak would make it come alive. She taught us stories of scripture but not simply by reading off a page. When we studied Moses on Mt. Sinai, she provide...  Read More

Sunday is Mother’s Day, so I thought I would give you a little history on this holiday (one that started, believe it or not, in a Methodist Church!).In 1908, Anna Jarvis coordinated the first Mother’s Day celebration at a local Methodist Church in West Virginia. She originally thought of the idea as a way to honor her own mother who had died a few years earlier. Soon she decided that honoring moth...  Read More