by Guy Sayles | Jun 27, 2017 |
This post originally appeared on the Center for Healthy Churches website on June 27, 2017.Ministry happens in the meantime and in the mean time.The meantime is a season of sometimes bewildering change and troubling transitions. It’s an interval between a past we know...
by Guy Sayles | Jun 20, 2017 |
I rarely watch a movie a second time or tune-in to reruns of television shows, not even the ones I’ve really enjoyed or have made a significant impression on me. Exceptions have been: The Wizard of Oz, the first movie by which I was mesmerized into enchantment; It’s a...
by Guy Sayles | Jun 13, 2017 |
My mother was two months shy of her 80th birthday when she died last Wednesday. She lived almost exactly a decade longer than my father, though she was never quite the same after cancer and its complications claimed his life. She gradually faded into the fog of...
by Guy Sayles | Jun 4, 2017 |
It’s painful to face and hard to admit: by the time I was a young adult, fear and shame had formed a dark and dank swamp in my heart. The swamp was fed by slowly-moving streams of culture, family, and folk-religion, streams which carried commands, words, stories, and...
by Guy Sayles | May 27, 2017 |
I recently spent a couple of days away from my cellphone, Facebook, email, and television. I can’t take complete credit for this media fast, since my cellphone wouldn’t work and there wasn’t a television where I stayed. The Sabbath from “Morning Joe” and “Hardball,”...
by Guy Sayles | May 15, 2017 |
The prologue to the Gospel of John provides a powerful metaphor for meaningful embodiment: “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, a glory filled with grace and truth.”This metaphor goes by the name “incarnation,” the kind of word which...
by Guy Sayles | May 9, 2017 |
We meet and know each other as bodies: tall, lanky, short, squat, round, lean, and average (whatever average is) bodies; bodies with tattoos and piercings, with scars or sciatica, and with acne or arthritis; stooped and aging bodies, svelte and athletic bodies, sick...
by Guy Sayles | May 1, 2017 |
My third (or fourth) grade teacher at Huie Elementary School in Clayton County, GA was Mr. Wilson, a young African-American man.I mention his race because it was the mid-1960s, and Clayton County wasn’t the most progressive part of metropolitan Atlanta, not by a long...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 27, 2017 |
Years ago, when I started blogging, I intended to post some sort of reflection at least three days a week. My secret goal was even more demanding: to take the advice of master marketer Seth Godin who says that it’s best to post each day. He encourages bloggers to...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 17, 2017 |
Over the last few years, especially when I moved out of my study at First Baptist Church of Asheville, I’ve culled hundreds of books from my personal library.During Lent this year, I took a critical look at the ones I still had and thinned-out the mixed herd.I...
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