A Confession

Here's the confessional prayer we'll be using at church tomorrow morning as we spend time thinking about the second iteration of the Ten Commandments. Hope to see you there... Confession: Ten Commandments Here’s a litany of confession based on the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 1-20; Deuteronomy 5:6-21).  It was written by…

Bearing Steadfast Witness

Many of you will have noticed that our church lawn is host to a new “Black Lives Matter” sign, as are several of the Protestant churches and other faith communities in Brattleboro, Dummerston and Guilford. Though the idea for the sign may have popped up around one horrific death of…

More Love

Greetings! We’ve been lucky enough to have a few visitors at church in recent months (not a common occurrence at most small country churches), and so I’ve been in the position of needing to share with new folks just what our church is all about. It’s good to have visitors…

Heartbroken

    Our world, so connected through the immediacy of social media and the 24/7 news cycle, has been rocked once again by violence. Less than 48 hours ago, a young man with violence in his heart and a gun in his possession entered the prayer gathering at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church…

WiFi, or The Church enters the 21st Century

A brief post:   WE HAVE INTERNET CONNECTIVITY!!!!!  Isn't that amazing?!   Or, to translate for our non-rural readers "Can you believe it took so long?!"   As we have finally entered the 21st century, I anticipate being better able to keep up with maintaining our website, as I'll be…

Living in Community:

Greetings! Not long ago, I found that I had been invited up to Montpelier to share the morning devotional moment with our state legislators. (Did you know that they start each day with a reflective moment? It’s called a “devotional,” though I’m not sure that language actually describes the breadth…

Ash Wednesday

I've been meaning all day to write something here, but life has interfered, and now here it is 9 at night. The day is past, and even evening, and we're into the dark and cold hours of night. This, perhaps, is why we focus on Lent. This is why we…

Prayers of the People

There are many wonderful things about being a pastor. One of them, in my experience, is that I get to pray with people. I pray with our congregation during Sunday services, I often pray with individual parishioners when they stop by seeking a companion as they work through particularly thorny…