Lent blog series: As goes Jesus, so goes love
Voices of Faith

Lent blog series: As goes Jesus, so goes love

When I was a little girl, a beloved Sunday school teacher gave me a small ivory cross with the words “John 3:16” etched on one side and the entirety of…
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Voices of Faith

Losing faith • finding it

Some years ago, just before Christmas, I was sitting and enjoying conversation with a staff member one minute, then lying on the ground the next, completely unaware that my body…
Grounded in grace
Voices of Faith

Grounded in grace

“All we had to eat was red Jell-O, flour and communion wafers,” she remembered, her eyes gazing into the past. A fundraiser for the ELCA’s global ministries, I was out…
Beautiful dust
Voices of Faith

Beautiful dust

You make beautiful things out of the dust / You make beautiful things out of us —Gungor. My dad knew the beauty of dust. Even before he was sick and…
Deeper understandings: To what end?
Voices of Faith

Deeper understandings: To what end?

Since the dawn of time, humans have asked these age-old questions: Who are we? Why are we here? In what can we hope? The Scriptures, as well as Christian theology,…
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Voices of Faith

Why are young adults leaving the church? Maybe that’s the wrong question

There’s an interesting article going around the internet about the absence of young adults in the church. The headline reads “59 percent of millennials raised in a church have dropped…
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Voices of Faith

Crosswalk encounter

He was in his wheelchair, in the crosswalk, struggling mightily to cross the busy street before the traffic light turned to red. It was obvious he wouldn’t make it. The…
Grounded in grace
Voices of Faith

Grounded in grace

Ann was hard to love. The confirmation class outcast, she suffered with a whole host of behavioral disorders. She fluctuated between making precocious and endearing observations, and having an outburst…
Her needs unseen
Voices of Faith

Her needs unseen

Being a compassionate person, you usually respond to the pleas of the needy around you with a generous heart. But are you and others somehow missing the obvious? Chances are,…
Deeper understandings: Hermeneutics
Voices of Faith

Deeper understandings: Hermeneutics

“Hermeneutics” is one of those words that you might have heard your pastor use. The English word comes from the Greek ermēneuein, meaning simply to translate or interpret. In short,…
Why infant baptism?
Voices of Faith

Why infant baptism?

If you were to Google the references to infant baptism in the New Testament, you would perhaps be disappointed, maybe even a little shocked. Though Jesus took children in his…