Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Pastoral Ministry’ Category

Jul 14

7 Comments

The Results Business

I recently made my way out to one of the units at the jail to deliver a few items that had been requested by inmates. Bibles, writing paper, calendars, devotionals, bible study courses—each must be documented, labeled with a name and a number, and then placed on the window sill at the bubble so the guys can see when there’s something for them. On my most recent trip, one of the guards noticed a name on one of the packages I was putting out which contained a bible study course. He snorted. “That guy’s not here any more. Down in the hole. Guess you were a few days too late with that stuff!” I smiled. Picked up my materials. “Yeah. I guess I was.” Read more

Jul 2

6 Comments

On Being Forgotten

Someone recently asked me why I haven’t sought to be more influential, as a pastor, a writer, a leader. Don’t you want to lead a larger church or write a book or build a following online? There’s a ministry trajectory, I suppose, at least according to some. Pastoring a small church and writing in a relatively small corner of the internet for the better part of two decades isn’t it. I instantly clicked into self-defence mode, reaching for justifications explanations ranging from the biblical (Jesus’ words about mustard seeds, etc) to the dispositional (I’m not a natural leader or social catalyst, don’t crave the mic, etc) with a bunch of other stops in between. The words felt limp coming out of my mouth.

Read more

May 28

2 Comments

Precious Gift

I’ve spent the last few days at a retreat centre in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with a small group of fellow pastors. The setting is magnificent and the weather has been surprisingly cooperative for springtime in Alberta. There’s been plenty of unstructured time for walking in the forests and reading by the river or just sitting and contemplating the vast beauty of all that God has made. It’s been good for the soul. Read more

Apr 14

8 Comments

At Just the Right Time

“That’s it?”

He looks at me with a mixture of incredulity and suspicion across a grungy table in a glorified storage closet at the jail. The setting, even given the context, is unimpressive. A broken vacuum cleaner. A bunch of haphazard toilet paper rolls. Some dust-covered supplies from the pandemic era. A couple plastic chairs. On the other side of the door, the buzzing and clanging and crashing and shouting that is the near-constant soundtrack out on the remand units. Read more

Mar 3

1 Comment

Hagar

At a church retreat last weekend, we spent some time talking about stories. Our own personal stories, the stories that we have lived into or out of, the broader stories in which we are all enmeshed. And, of course, the stories of Scripture, which for many of us have shaped us in the deepest ways, for better or for worse. It’s fascinating, as someone who is often tasked with selecting the scriptures that we will hear and reflect on each Sunday, to get a window into how people in our church look at the Bible—the stories they are drawn to, the stories that repel them, the stories that inspire them, the stories that confuse them, the stories they struggle to know what to do with or how and when to tell them. Read more

Feb 24

6 Comments

Haunted (Whispers in a Ruined House)

He looks at me warily as he approaches the guard’s station at the jail. He’s thirty-something, huge beard, menacing tattoos snaking up and around his neck and bald head. I stand there, inoffensively, with my clipboard and my death notification. “I’m a chaplain here, just wondering if you’d like to talk to someone about losing your dad?” I motion over to the interview room over in the corner of the unit and start to walk in that direction. His expression doesn’t change. “Not really,” says. He follows me anyway. Read more

Feb 4

1 Comment

“Don’t Put Words in My Mouth!”

Anyone who is involved in giving leadership to corporate worship regularly finds themselves in the position of putting words in people’s mouths. Asking people to read Scripture, inviting people to participate in responsive liturgies or corporate prayers of confession, selecting songs to be sung by the gathered community—each of these elements of worship (and others) involve, on some level, some people telling other people what they should say or pray or sing out loud. Read more

Jan 13

7 Comments

Tuesday Miscellany (On Weakness and Strength)

Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files are always a welcome sight when they show up in my inbox. I don’t always agree or resonate with his responses to queries from his fans, but they are almost invariably interesting. Today, for example, Cave responds briefly (often only a word or a sentence) to a wide range of questions from around the world. Naturally, I am always drawn to the ones that have to do with faith. Two fans were fairly disgusted with Cave’s, for lack of a better term, “religious turn” in the latter part of his career. One American fan wondered how anyone with “half a brain would believe in God.” Another, JL from Canada, queried, “Is religion not the refuge of the weak?” Cave responded thus:

Yes, JL, it is precisely that. Christianity in particular.

Read more

Dec 18

4 Comments

God is Born

Christmas at the jail is invariably a night of brutal dissonances. Kitschy decorations (Santas, elves, cardboard fireplaces, candy canes) labouring to add a bit of colour to drab concrete and plastic. Christmas carols competing for auditory space with the squawk and buzz of intercoms and the clanging of heavy doors. Ornate words about hope and joy in a place where despair and cynicism come more naturally. In the Christian life, there is always a gap between the hope we proclaim and the reality we experience. This is life in between Christ’s advents. At the jail, the gap just seems exponentially wider. Read more

Dec 10

1 Comment

To Not Feel Lost in the World

A friend recently directed my attention to an episode of CBC’s The Current where the subject matter was Gen Z’s return to Christianity. Many are noticing that the kids are coming back to church. At least some of them. We’re not exactly talking a tidal wave here, but certainly a steady trickle. What on earth is going on, the venerable CBC wanted to know? Read more

Nov 19

3 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany: On Sex and Transcendence

Whenever a topic or cluster of topics keep showing up in different areas of my life and ministry, I eventually decide it’s worth paying attention to and, if possible, try to write something about it. When I can’t quite seem to come up with a solid piece of unified writing, I default to a “Miscellany” post. So, what follows is not necessarily a coherent argument, just a few short reflections and observations picked up over the last little while. Read more

Nov 4

Forty Chickens

Hope builds a bridge across the abyss into which reason cannot look. It can hear an undertone to which reason is deaf. Reason does not recognize the signs of what is coming, what is not yet born.

— Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope

*** 

We were talking about hope out at the jail yesterday. A few guys had shared about how they desperately needed hope, to believe that there could be something different in their future, something besides the same old habits, the endless tired returning to the same endlessly tired dead-ends. One guy looked up with a half-grin that was somewhere between cynical, mischievous, and dejected. “I don’t got no hope anymore. I stole forty chickens and there’s no future for me.” Read more

Oct 21

2 Comments

On Slop, Sadness, and Shared Humanity

Any given Monday at the jail contains no small number of sadnesses. I feel sad when I see grown men and women who can barely read. Sad when I see inmates being yelled at. Sad when I hear loud crude conversations out the door as the inmates make their way to chapel. Sad when I read incident reports. Sad when I hear stories of the damage inflicted by damaged people. Sad when I see inmates whose birth years are earlier than my kids’. Sad when I hear people tell me that jail is the only place where they feel safe from themselves and their addictions. Sad when I hear about the casual chaos and violence in which so many lives are (mal)formed. Read more

Oct 14

4 Comments

The Faith that Makes Well

The gospel reading for this past Sunday (Thanksgiving Sunday, here in Canada) was Luke 17:11-19. In it, Jesus heals ten lepers who cry out to him for mercy. Only one returns to give thanks (a Samaritan), and Jesus commends him for it. Connections between lectionary texts and the secular calendar don’t really come much more obvious than this, I suppose. Don’t be like the nine ungrateful lepers who pranced off into their more hopeful futures with scarcely a thought for their Healer. Be like the Samaritan. Make sure you give thanks because this makes Jesus happy. Read more

Sep 9

The Devil Made Me Do It

In contrast to my expectations—and against my most stubborn and misguided intentions—spiritual warfare was on the agenda again at the jail yesterday. I had a safer topic in mind, but no sooner had I began my talk than we were wandering in the thickets. Read more

Sep 2

2 Comments

On Mental and Spiritual Health

For at least the last few decades, I have regularly encountered a shift in how Christians employ the categories of mental health and spiritual health. I can’t remember precisely when this shift started, sometime in my twenties or thirties probably. Often someone would share some story of a clumsy pastoral interaction where they came to the church with a problem—say trouble in a marriage or a difficult child or abuse of some kind or some traumatic experience that was proving debilitating—and the pastor left the impression that all you really had to do was pray the problem away. Read more

Jul 12

5 Comments

On Doing Our Duty

I attended the funeral of my childhood pastor yesterday. He was well into his nineties, had lived a good, long life whose shape was defined by faith and family. I didn’t know him well. I’m not sure that knowing the pastor well would have even been on my childhood radar as something desirable or even possible. The pastor was kind of like the librarian or the Zamboni driver at the ice rink—someone who was just always there. His sermons were not particularly riveting, nor did he exude charisma from the pulpit. He was just this stable given in my life. Actually, I should check that pernicious word “just.” In a world where so many lives are characterized by instability, chaos and confusion, where so much communication is reduced to marketing and manipulation, where so many relationships are temporary and self-serving, we could probably all use a few more stable unspectacular givens in our lives. Read more

Jul 8

1 Comment

All Things to All People

I couldn’t help but cringe along this morning as I read an article by Giles Fraser on the search for a replacement for Justin Welby as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the head of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion. The piece is ominously titled “Anglicanism’s Poisoned Chalice.” According to Fraser, it’s a job that nobody with any sense would want.

Read more

« Older Entries