Regional Director, Calling Congregations
April 21, 2007
I was born and raised in the Hill District, arguably Pittsburgh's roughest neighborhood. After my father and mother separated, my mother raised me and my two brothers on Chauncey Drive, an inner-city housing project. Growing up, I longed for the affirmation of male approval andso, by the age of 12, I found myself ripping and running the treacherous streets of the Hill District. My friends and I began with sex, alcohol and marijuana, and then moved into grand-theft auto and dealing marijuana and crack-cocaine.During this time, I looked to the streets, television and the music industry to find what it meant to be a man. But I was sliding down a slippery slope. The delusions of sex, drugs, and adrenaline-stimulating events temporarily satisfied an internal longing of my soul with quickfixes, but I was growing numb, even to these things.
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Regional Director, Calling Congregations
April 16, 2007
In July 2001 I became the pastor of an aging African American United Methodist congregation on the south side of Chicago. One of my initial major tasks - as the congregation saw it - was to open our doors to more children and young adults and welcome them into our membership fold. "Easy," I thought, as I resolved to build upon the ministry of the pastor before me.Not so easy, I found out. The surrounding community perceived our membership to be old school, "bourgie" and resistant to change. To be sure, many of our members were old school and resistant to change. Many of the young adults (though not all) who had grown up in the church got tired of trying to introduce new thought and ways of worship into thecongregation, and they left to worship in churches with more contemporary services.
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Scholar-in-Residence
April 11, 2007
Recently, a friend shared this story with me. It is the Sunday morning before high school graduation. Eight robed seniors stand in front of the congregation. The pastor introduces the students, giving each one a moment to shine. Before one student, the pastor pauses to tell thecongregation that they should feel particularly proud of Mark as he will graduate fourth in his class."What are you going to do next?" the pastor asks. Mark answers that he's going to attend the nearby state university to major in physicaltherapy.
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Regional Director, Calling Congregations
April 06, 2007
All people are created to speak their voices into the world. Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), a black woman fighting to be heard within a community resistant to her voice, penned this idea in the late 1800s. 1 Born a slave in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1858, Cooper experienced throughout much of her life what she described as "a thumping within." 2 All people, she insisted, are called to give voice to God's promises of justice and hope, to respond to this "thumping within" - the sound of vocation in one's soul.Theological discussions of vocation often start with the word's Latin root - vox - and we think first of God's voice. God speaks, and sunlight paints earth's dawn on the canvas of night. God calls out, and sounds tumble forth as birdsong. God's voice creates. God's voice summons.
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Regional Director, Calling Congregations
April 01, 2007
In our Vocation and Culture feature, Patricia Hendricks asks pastors and other leaders to imagine what it might be like to engage young people in discussions where they, not we, supply the agenda. This, she posits, is where the Spirit of God is leading the church. Perhaps imagination and surprise are things most needed in our life today as the body of Christ. More than anything, we seem to be aware of the dilemmas and double binds that dog us, individually and collectively. We feel a great need to pass on the treasure of faith to young people, but, instead, they come to us bearing their own story of spiritual pilgrimage and asking us to recognize the Christ already active in their lives.
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President
The Fund for Theological Education
June 17, 2004
An adult bible study curriculum based on the book of 1st Samuel.
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Vice President for Ministry Programs and Planning
June 15, 2004
At the Fund for Theological Education, we encourage highly capable young
people to consider the vocation of congregational ministry: men and
women with exceptional abilities as thinkers, leaders, communicators,
and agents of the Christian faith and life. While we are
whole-hearted in this stance, in actuality, I sometimes worry about it.
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