Inside My Church

On the Sunday before Christmas… probably during announcements. We had the children’s pageant that morning, so it was a full house. That second shot – wide angle lens! – makes it look more narrow that it really is. Actually, it’s almost a square. My husband, Adam, took these pictures from the back, where he sits […]

Church Is Where They Tell You What To Do

  “Why would you want to go somewhere where they just want to tell you what to do?” A friend of a friend’s husband asked this, when his wife was thinking about attending church with their children. My friend, a churchgoer with a rebel soul, happened to be there. She came back with: “Mark, you know […]

St. Benedict Was A Suburbanite

The patron saint of my church is St. Benedict, who lived in Italy in the 6th century. He was one of the first people to organize a monastery that wasn’t eccentric or extreme. His monks ate three meals a day, slept in beds, and, although they went to church nine (!) times a day and […]

Who forgot to turn their phone off?

Yesterday, during worship (during my sermon, actually), a cell phone went off. Since I was preaching at the time, I could see the whole congregation and I noticed who reached in their jacket to turn off the phone. Adam asked me, later that day, “Whose cell phone went off in church this morning?” (Because this […]