Every year on July 4th, the residents of the neighborhood I live in gather together for a day-long celebration that includes a potluck lunch, a parade, a water balloon toss, and several other events. It's a huge deal—everyone looks forward to this long-standing tradition, and our block party is by far the largest in town.

The event always includes the requisite brief speech by one of the residents from the neighborhood on freedom, independence, citizenship, or some similar theme. I have never been the master of ceremonies (and probably never will be, since I seem to have been born without the gene for patriotism), but each year I do think a bit about what I wish would be said in that speech. 

This year, I wish I could talk about resistance.

Suppose you were to sit down and write a lengthy summary of all that you have learned about the Bible, church history, the historical Jesus, and other topics of faith that interest you, but without using any footnotes or citations. Perhaps you would organize your material chronologically, creating chapters for the beliefs you held or developed at times in your life. Or, perhaps you would take a more systematic approach, starting with your understanding of scripture or your theology of God and using that as the jumping off point for all other topics. Whatever approach you would take, it's an interesting intellectual exercise to consider, and an even better one to carry out some day.

Dr. Carl Krieg is one individual who took the time to do this exercise, and the result is the book The Void and the Vision: A Thought-provoking Interpretation of the Gospel of Jesus that Challenges Traditional Belief. Dr. Krieg has taught religious studies at Thiel College, served as a pastor in both the Lutheran Church in America and in the United Church of Christ, and has another book published by Fortress Press. He approached this exercise by putting together a list of commonly asked questions, such as, "Why didn’t everyone who met Jesus believe in him?" and "Do we need one another, or can we go it alone?" Then, he set about answering these questions in a way that is clear and concise yet honest, gentle, personal, and borne out of the fruit of years of scholarly study and reflection.

“God, we ask that you be with each person in this class during the upcoming week.” The children jump up and immediately begin high-fiving one another while saying each person’s name. Each child shares a high-five with every other child in the class before sitting down again. When the last child sits down, the entire class shouts, “Amen.”

Has the teacher lost control of this class? No, the children have just prayed for one another.

One of the projects I'm working on is a faith formation website for the Iowa Conference of the United Methodist Church. When it is finished, the site will contain information about the many faith formation / Christian education ministries of the conference, with content created by many leaders from around the state. So that I don't have to do all of the work myself, I chose to create the website (which you can preview here) using a Content Management System.

According to Wikipedia, a Content Management System, or CMS, is a "computer application used to manage work flow needed to collaboratively create, edit, review, index, search, publish, and archive various kinds of digital media and electronic text." Put more simply, a CMS is a website creation tool that typically resides online rather than on your hard drive.

A child comes bursting out of the Sunday School classroom proudly waving tissue paper flowers in one hand. “Look what I made!” the child exclaims. The parent responds with suitable admiration.

At lunch that day, with the tissue paper flowers residing in a place of honor on the table, the parent asks, “Why did you make tissue paper flowers in Sunday School today? What was the lesson about?”

“I don’t know,” is the reply, accompanied by a shoulder shrug.

When I worked as a youth director, I quickly learned that it’s always helpful to have a few games and activities that I could pull out at a moment’s notice to use when youth are bored. (This skill literally got me a job at one church, because I was able to turn a chaotic and unstructured Superbowl party into a time of community-building.) One of the tricks I’ve developed over the years is being able to describe an individual’s personality by looking at a picture of a house that they have drawn for me. It’s not an exact science by any means, but after seeing several hundred house drawings over the years, I’ve discovered a lot of patterns.

One of the first things I look at is the person’s orientation toward life: are they a “(P)ast,” “(N)ow,” or “(F)uture” person. “Pasts” or Ps are people who spend a great deal of time thinking about the past, often because of guilt or shame about something that happened to them years ago. “Futures” or Fs are people who are always planning, dreaming about things to come, and wishing something in their future would happen right now (like getting a driver’s license or leaving home for college). Among youth, the largest group are “Nows” or Ns, people who—for the most part—live for today and focus on immediate interests and concerns.