I have been reading Pastor Andy Stanley’s new book, out this week, “Deep & Wide.” He says it’s a book about “creating churches unchurched people love to attend.” My kind of book about my kind of church. The only time the word “church” is used in the four Gospels comes in the Gospel of Matthew. […]
In graduate school, my specialization was “ecclesiology” which is the study of the Church itself: what it is, how it is constituted and how it grows. Ever since, my abiding interest, as regular readers know, is growing healthy churches. The so-called “mega-church” movement therefore, and not surprisingly, holds special interest for me. “Mega-church” is a […]
Every weekend around here is interesting, engaging and eventually exhausting (for me anyway). This past weekend was at another level. Besides everything we do every weekend, this past weekend we welcomed Archbishop William Lori, who made visiting Nativity one of his early priorities. As he told me, he hears so much about our parish (one […]
We are very excited about this weekend. We are welcoming Archbishop William Lori, who will be touring our campus on Sunday morning and then celebrating the 12n Mass. On the day of his installation he pulled me aside to tell me he wanted to visit Nativity as soon as his schedule permitted, and this weekend […]
We have an expression around here when we’re excited about something, when it’s fresh and new and exciting: we say it’s “off the hook.” Well this coming weekend is going to be nothing less than “off the hook.” This is “Kick-Off Weekend” when we kick off our fall programs. We have programs for kids and […]
This morning we had an all-call staff gathering to take a look at the new church year (2012-2013), which starts today. After Mass, we gathered for bagels and coffee and some great sharing all about the amazing time that is just ahead for us. Tom, my associate, gave an overview of what’s ahead for our […]
This weekend brings an end to summer, an end to our final summer message series. We’ve been discussing the Holy Spirit and we called the series “The Other Guy” because the Spirit can sometimes seem like the forgotten member of the Trinity. Bottom line, the Spirit is a person. And you can have a relationship […]
As many of you know, my associate Tom Corcoran and I have been working on a book for the past year, working especially hard these past weeks, with final edits. We have also been in discussion with our editor about a title. It was an interesting process and probably two-dozen titles were actively discussed and […]
This is the third and final segment in my a reflection this past week asking the question, “What is going on?” as in, “What is going on in churchworld?” Things no longer seem to be going well in many, many different slices of church life across the country, and why that is so, or how […]
Currently I am asking the question, “What is going on?” as in, what is going on in churchworld? A sampling of some of what prompts the question. In a certain region of one diocese four very different parishes have suddenly been merged into one. Aside from the grief and pain of losing their own parishes, […]
