Seeking Salvation : Christianity, Faith, Methodism

                    I remember watching members of the evangelism team at a local megachurch wandering the streets of Downtown Minneapolis, handing out tracts and praying with people in an attempt to lead them to Christ. My kids attended Sunday School there because the Sunday School at my home church wasn’t very good at this point, so I was a regular at their Sunday evening services.  I noticed that I never saw people who had prayed with this team in the auditorium. Instead, I met a lot of folks whose lives had been changed through the food pantry ministry, the chemical dependency clinic, their children’s participation in the private school on campus, and the bookstore. All of these spaces provided acts of signs and wonders in these people's lives that they could expressly point to, and that led to them changing their lives in the way God was calling them to.  Just preaching the word isn’t enough. It must be follo...

By Carol Meile   I have a bee in my bonnet. Lately, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the plague of binary thinking that pervades our culture. It is literally tearing it apart. We have good and bad, light and dark, red and blue, MAGA and progressive. All these binary dualities of thought and to what end? We haven’t solved any of the major issues in our country. In fact, we have used our binary culture to kick the can down the road to the point of garbage being in the streets, homeless people in mass encampments, and the poor, regardless of location, largely forgotten, and we treat migrants inhumanely.  This has to stop. There are millions of color combinations hundreds of economic and political approaches, a country can do things other than erect walls at its border, and we house and feed everyone on Earth. All of this is doable. We have the technology. What we don’t have in this country is any form of will. A pervasive laziness has taken over society. We have a...

         (Photo by Ian Stauffer)       I have had a horrible bout of writer's block this week. I have done all the things that a writer/ pastor should do. I prayed and studied the scripture and sought counsel. I just started writing because sometimes you can write yourself out of a funk. All to no relief. And the longer it went, the more I panicked because Sunday was coming, and I needed to say something.        I woke up this morning four days later, and poof, it was gone. No idea why it just lifted, and it got me thinking. Sometimes we have problems that are not up to us to solve. We may want to solve them, and others around us may want us to solve them, but sometimes it's not our problem to solve but God's.       In the case of writer's block, going on with life and doing other things like pastoral visits and reading pushed the problem into God's lap. I had prayed, I had studied, I had sought co...

 According to CNN, an “Oklahoma lawsuit seeks to block opening of first publicly funded religious charter school in the US”. [1] This false narrative is that religion and public schools should not be separate but interwoven. The question is which religion, even if we assume Christianity, there are hundreds of variations within the US alone!  The truth is that God is present and doesn’t need human endorsement or funding. God was there before the staff and kids arrived. God is there through how our children and staff treat each other. As kids seek to love their neighbors as themselves, and teacher and staff seek to show patience, perseverance, and excellence, in all of this, God is present.  God doesn’t need human approval to act, so what is really driving this push? Let me argue that families desire to get a parochial education at taxpayer expense. The Constitution, though, is clear in the First Amendment “Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or pro...