Slavery is not the path to success, and once we see that, our history reveals an important lesson for us all. [It is the last week of July 2020.  At the beginning of the month I started writing about race and current events (see “Black Power & Little Micah,” “Measuring

There is a class we have begun offering this year at our church to teach women how to be safe in the world and help them recover from trauma.  It’s a unique and needed class that I think is doing a lot of good. Cleaning up after the last class,

“One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” – Zhou Enlai On Monday of this week, millions of Americans enjoyed a day off of work and out of school to honor their U.S. presidents – past and present.  If the quote above from

This might upset some folks at the beginning, but it is important and headed to a good place. Identity politics is quite the rage these days.  I think it is well intentioned but doesn’t lead to the place its adherents long for. Identity politics is the trend in viewing and

Here is a confession – I get pretty frustrated about prayer sometimes and angry and frustrated with the ONE I am praying to. I know I’m not supposed to. After all, I’m a pastor and a longtime Christian.  I think the expectation is that I’m supposed to have unwaveringly serene

This past Sunday, I preached the first lesson in a Relationship series on Assertiveness. The part of the Bible the teaching came from was Matthew 18:15-20 where Jesus is teaching his followers how to get along with each other and navigate relationships through difficult moments. Right in the middle of

A lot of people don’t know the difference between niceness and kindness.  They sound similar, but they couldn’t be more different. The best example I’ve ever heard that illustrates the difference comes from a friend of mine while he was with the U.S. Special Forces fighting in Iraq. He had

None of these give the whole picture, but are worth their place on the board. “The whole of the emotional case against capitalism turns on the unequal distribution of wealth. But is it peculiar to the nature of capitalism to concentrate wealth in a few hands? Here the first aspect truth is a

As the Gallup chart for this post shows, race relations in the United States have tanked in the last few years.  As a minister of a racially diverse church in a racially diverse neighborhood this concerns me a great deal.  This means that white people and black people – at

A couple of years ago my wife Carrie was driving through our neighborhood with several black teenagers in her minivan – mostly boys I believe. They were all friends of ours and part of our church. As they drove past a patrol car, the officer inside looked at them, pulled