Former heavyweight boxer James (Quick) Tillis is a cowboy from Oklahoma who fought out of Chicago in the early 1980s. He still remembers his first day in the Windy City after his arrival from Tulsa. “I got off the bus with two cardboard suitcases under my arms in downtown Chicago and stopped in front of […]
This story is familiar. In 1972, and after 308 years, the First Church of Newton, Mass., called it quits. It gave its assets to a museum, sold its building to a Greek Evangelical Church, and disbanded. Started in 1664, the church rose to a high of 1,200 members in 1952 but dropped to 325 in […]
The press reported a heart-rending story, telling of a young father who shot himself in a telephone booth. James Lee had called a Chicago newspaper and told a reporter he had sent the paper a manila envelope containing the story of his suicide. The reporter traced the call, but it was too late! When the […]
In the first century, Rome executed criminals by crucifixion. It was a humiliating and agonizing experience. There was no concept of death with dignity for the guilty. According to “Roman Antiquities”, after a man was sentenced to die, he was stripped of his clothes and paraded through the streets of the city, so that his […]
24 Thomas, the one called Didymus, one of the Twelve, wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” But he replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his […]
In his 1983 acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] recalled the words he heard as a child when his elders sought to explain the ruinous upheavals in Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” He added, “If I were called upon to identify briefly the […]
“Can’t see your nose in front of your face “ Idiom Meaning – Being oblivious to something obvious, in clear view. On the Road to Emmaus Jesus had His faithful disciples not recognize him. It is easy to focus on the disciples short-comings. To see the disciples as men with a weak faith or just […]
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.[1] Luke 24:34 Near the end of Irving Stone’s powerful novel, Love Is Eternal, about Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln, there is a moving conversation between Mrs. Lincoln and the President’s bodyguard, Parker, who had been summoned to Mrs. Lincoln’s room. “Why were you not at […]
There’s an old saying, “God couldn’t be everywhere at once, so he made moms.” That statement has horrible theology in it. But it attempts to convey the importance motherhood plays in our lives. Mothers hold a special place and role that no one else can fill. This post is about the importance of motherhood. The […]
Urban Ministry is messy. It involves loving all people. Some come into our stream of consciousness with messy and broken lives. Because of the struggles their lives have gone through that makes our ministry with them will look messy. Our need to include others makes our partnerships with community leaders and congregations outside the comfort […]
