Untitled

[bethestock]

Women Starting New Things offered by With Coaching Consortium

Women Starting New Things offered by With Coaching Consortium

There were certain seasons in the life of church leadership that I found particularly difficult as a pastor. The first was gearing up for September programming and the second was the New Year when I had to move from Advent/Christmas recovery to Lent and Easter programming. Often I would loose track of the overall direction of the church and would end up on autopilot moving from season to season…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

The Counterintuitive Way of Jesus

The Counterintuitive Way of Jesus

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.  What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?               Matthew 16:24-26

I…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

What if I Don't Like the Person that is "Me"?

What if I Don’t Like the Person that is “Me”?

There was a time in my life when I was afraid of silence. If I wasn’t with someone I was filling my time with the TV, radio or music. That was until someone challenged me to a practice of silence, just 5 minutes a day, in order to pay attention to my interior thoughts and feelings. At the time I thought that it would be a simple practice to add to my day on my commute to work. Instead of the…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

Why would anyone ever want to be a part of a church?

Why would anyone ever want to be a part of a church?

The other day two women came to my door to give me a religious tract. They were from the Jehovah’s Witness church. I admired their courage to knock on doors and hand out religious tracks in one of the least churched areas in the USA. So I thanked them, took their track, closed the front door and then, without even looking at it, I threw it in my recycling bin. I shook my head in bafflement and…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

#MeToo -- My story of Sexual Harassment in the Church

#MeToo — My story of Sexual Harassment in the Church

In 1988 I graduated from Candler School of Theology with a Masters of Divinity degree ready to launch out into the world as a pastor. After a year of Advanced Clinical Pastoral Education at Baptists Medical Centers in Birmingham, Alabama I married my husband and we settled in Atlanta where he attended school. I was a 27 year-old woman from the Midwest hoping to get ordained as an Elder in the…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

Why Church?

I often get a sense that as mainline Christians we don’t understand the significance of our work in the 21st century. Too often we get stuck as we look with dread at church decline and the growing numbers of “Spiritual but not Religious”, as if we are looking over a cliff with no way forward. Our response to this has been a series of reactions:

Denial with a myopic focus of doing what we have…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

Finding our Moral Grounding in a Clash of Values

Finding our Moral Grounding in a Clash of Values

The religious minister has the obligation to defend values; what happens is that the political world can become overly scrupulous: it listens to a pastor and they say that he is preaching against so and so. We do not preach against anyone; we refer to the value that is in danger and that must be safeguarded. — Pope Francis “On Heaven and Earth”

There is an underlying narrative that we seem to be…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

River Time Yoga Retreat

River Time Yoga Retreat

I came to the practice of yoga 23 years ago when I was expecting my first child. The class was for pregnant women who wanted to do natural childbirth. What surprised me even then was how calm and centered I felt after the classes. Two healthy births, a stressful job and a move across the country brought me back to yoga 17 years ago — at first once a week and then twice a week. Now the practice of…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

Buen Camino

The greeting on the path is “Buen Camino”, meaning “Have a good journey”, but it can also be a gracious reminder that all ways of walking are good ways.

Nothing quite prepares you for a pilgrimage.

Sure, there is the research on the pilgrimage route, choosing the proper walking gear, exercise preparation, and the strategic packing of just a few clothes and essentials, but the pilgrimage itself calls into question any illusion of control we think we have in life.

Camino Frances is a 500 mile walk across the northern part of Spain that begins in…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

And They Had All things Together

And They Had All things Together

We live in complex and polarizing times. Our institutions are declining and our sense of job security and family safety is on heighten alert. Our neighborhoods are growing in diversity with a multiplicity of cultural expressions that challenge our assumptions and codes of conduct. And we are beginning to question lots of things – truth, gender identities, race relations, the economy, politics,…

View On WordPress

[bethestock]

Reports from the Spiritual Frontier

Reports from the Spiritual Frontier

  My friend Ben Yosua-Davis has launched a new podcast called “Reports from the Spiritual Frontier” His vision is to have conversations with people working on the spiritual margins of our country.  Even though he is just beginning to live out this dream, I love his concept and the interviews that he has already posted. (Okay, one of those was with me!)

I have listened to all of them and have…

View On WordPress