Six Months Quaker Preacher My Very Own False Advisers Ryan, my doctoral adviser, sent this to me this morning, and I confess I had a good chuckle over the fact that all three of my PhD committee members are considered false teachers: “Its common to see the promotion of false teachers from the Emerging Church Movement such as
Six Months Quaker Preacher Life is a Miracle: Making Peace with All Things (Col. 1:15-23) This is my sermon from this past Sunday on making peace with the earth. First A Confession: This is not a topic I have not always cared about. I am no scientist. I am a total hack when it comes to gardening at this point. I still have quite a
Six Months Quaker Preacher (Not A) Golden Mouth I’m hoping some day preaching becomes the kind fluid movement for me that other people in their professions seem to acquire with their skills of necessity. You know, where the person is so keyed in that it doesn’t even look like they’re doing what they are doing?
Six Months Quaker Preacher Lifestyle I’ve been thinking about my lifestyle a lot lately. One reason for this is that I’ve recently had trouble with my back and neck and have suffered from some pretty intense tension headaches. I started going to the chiropractor about a month ago and that has helped some
Six Months Quaker Preacher Can Quakers Plan? I never used to be big on planning ahead. In undergrad I was the guy working on papers through the night and then jogging to class with a wet ink on a newly printed research paper. My grades showed for it. Then I got married and went to grad school.
Green On Earth As it is in Heaven This is the last week for peace month at Camas Friends even though January officially ended a couple days ago. I thought why not extend it just a little longer so we can focus on making peace with the earth? To get things started off properly I decided to take
Six Months Quaker Preacher Feeding Sheep With Steady Diets of This and That I’ve missed a few days of posting for my series (I try to post on the days I work) but I’m back on it. I last wrote about my full weekend, and was it ever full?! Here are a few highlights. I was approved to be on the
Six Months Quaker Preacher A Full Weekend Ahead I had the best intentions of writing a post about yesterday, but I was just too exhausted and went to bed after watching my favorite “fake news” shows. This morning I’m headed out to our Mid-Year Boards for the Yearly Meeting where I have been put on our leadership
Blog Entries Homeless in Our Town? Since high school I have been drawn to ministry among the poor. Part of it was because we grew up poor (at least compared to those around us, we weren’t on the street or anything). And part of it was because I felt like I could identify with people
Blog Entries Conversion(s) b Just as I was heading to bed last night I learned that Howard Zinn, history professor and author at Boston University, had passed away yesterday from a heart attack. When I think about the conversions that have taken place throughout my life Zinn is someone who plays a role. I
Six Months Quaker Preacher Decompressing Yesterday was a day on the run. My feet didn’t stop moving until sometime after 9pm last night and L was finally asleep. When I sat down, I felt like I was still moving, and my mind was jogging at a pace I couldn’t keep up with (which
The Pastorate The Final Word? I got into an interesting discussion today with a gentleman after our meeting for worship about unprogrammed Quakers. He said he had heard “Silent” worship described by someone (a non-Quaker) as similar to a séance and wondered if the practice really is non-Christian. I think it’s a fair question.
Community Living as a contrasting/inspiring/beautiful Community (Romans 12:14-17) Here’s my sermon from today. Its true that sometimes community doesnt always work out right. Emily and I were a part of a small house church a few years back that used the word community as a kind of buzz word but it became rather oppressive because
Blog Entries Reader Poll: Sermon Texts on the Blog? [crowdsignal poll=2580078] Would you like for Wess’ sermon texts to be posted on the blog so you can read them? (polling)
Six Months Quaker Preacher An Unexpected Turn (in Antwerp) It’s been a hectic week so today was the day for sermon writing. I often like to have it written on Thursday so I can use Friday as a day to rework and tweak what I’ve written or as a day for meetings, and working on other articles
Conversion Conversion(s) a As of late, I’ve been wrestling with the whole idea of conversion. I grew up going to Catholic mass, going to Catholic schools, learning the Catholic way. I never spent much time thinking about conversion in this context, partially because I was young (I stopped attending Catholic-everything after 8th
Six Months Quaker Preacher Take Thought for What is Noble/Beautiful in The Sight of All Today was somewhat of a typical day for me. I did a bunch of office work this morning, answering emails, going through mail, organizing paperwork and I also watched a number of tutorials on the Bible software I use for working on my sermons. Later in the day I spent
The Theological The Power (and Difficulty) of Forgiveness Of the many things to be considered today the thing that stands out to me as I sit down to write this is the film we watched this evening called “The Power of Forgiveness.” Four of us from our meeting traveled to St. Luke’s Episcopal in downtown Vancouver to
Six Months Quaker Preacher Bookface and The Internet Cafe Today we had our meeting for worship and I spoke on Hospitality based in Romans 12:9-13. Afterward we did a our second “Internet Cafe,” something I made sure to name in a way that would signal my favorite things: the web, food and coffee. This is something we started
Six Months Quaker Preacher Meeting People Is Easy One thing I love about my job is meeting new people, and subsequently, meeting with people. I love hearing other people’s stories, their ideas and convictions. And, as is fairly obvious, I love to share my own ideas and passions with people too. Every meeting invites the opportunity to
Caput The Call of Hospitality (Doesn’t Need to be long) This Sunday we’re talking about hospitality and peace. I’m pulling from Romans 12:3-13 but especially the very last line from v. 13 “extend hospitality to strangers.” Hospitality is not only one of my favorite themes in Scripture, but in theological and philosophical writings as well. While I
Six Months Quaker Preacher Being Educated in Life and Death I was way too tired last night to post about the day, so here’s for Wednesday. I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned it here or not but I’ve been meeting with a woman in hospice for the past few months. I met her back in the
Six Months Quaker Preacher Second Tuesdays With the Elders This evening we had our elder’s meeting. We have five elders, three women and two men, plus myself and the clerk of the meeting, who usually attends but doesn’t have to. We have a great age range, swath of life experiences, different experiences of God and a panorama
Six Months Quaker Preacher Mondays are For Practicing Taking Time Off I have a hard time winding down. My mind is usually juggling a number of things all at once: replaying a conversation over here, working on my sermon over there, considering this or that idea for school on this side, and thinking about what needs done at home over on
Six Months Quaker Preacher Six Months With a Quaker Preacher Project As you may have noticed it’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged with much passion, or interest. This isn’t necessarily a problem, things like this come and go, and in the grand scheme of things this blog is inconsequential. Where it becomes a concern for me
