Pat pleaded, “What are you saying?! How long does he have?” The oncologist replied, “With kids I’ve known with this kind of tumour, it is usually a matter of months, though sometimes we can be surprised, and it may be a bit longer.” The devastation in the room was palpable.
While I was working on my dissertation, I was also serving in spiritual care, in palliative care, in pediatric trauma. Here I was writing and thinking about these big picture ideas about hope when I was walking with people who were facing endings and facing their own death.
Time takes its toll on a church building. In turn, an aging building can take its toll on the members. It’s time to rejuvenate the building—or even build anew. This will take significant funds over and above a congregation’s annual budget. But how?
A conversation with Dr. Douglas John Hall about church, culture, power, anxiety and challenge.
Ask a room full of people about church and you will open up not just a box of stories but a range of meanings, connotations and denotations that are as varied as the people you are speaking to.
Why was I having such a difficult time referring to the people in my midst, my family and friends and the people I cherish outside of the Christian limits as “the other?” Could it be because I was once the other? Maybe I still am.
Isn’t it fitting to imagine the church as one expansive social network, a web of interconnected communities, extending to the far reaches of the globe?
After a long media career, I turned to media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who early shaped my mindset, as I reflected on what we might call Numerical Decline Anxiety Syndrome in mainline churches.
Troubled by the issue of human trafficking and the sex trade and the common sight of sex workers in our neighbourhoods, the Presbytery of East […]
In Canada, between 700,000 and four million people each year are affected by human trafficking. Each one of those is someone’s son or daughter, granddaughter or grandson, sister or brother.
“Travelling Christmas carols!” my friend Faye announced. “I saw it in a movie once and I think our church should try it.”
It is easy to see the heroism displayed by people who play a role in tragic or cataclysmic events. But what about those of us who live out our lives without finding ourselves in situations of danger? What does ordinary heroism (if we can call it that) look like?
Canada is one of the most developed and economically stable countries in the world. Due to this it is very difficult for someone like me who comes from one of the least developed countries to draw a clear line to demarcate the poor, middle class and the rich.
I sat among young people in the wood-paneled chapel of Presbyterian College. It was just after 9 a.m. on a Saturday and the city of Montreal was quiet. We were beginning a journey. For one week, these young people would be learning to preach.
We are not isolated individuals; we are a community. God calls us to look after each other, even when we don’t know what to do or say.
Rev. John Veenstra organized prayer services during the search for Tim Bosma, appeared beside Bosma’s widow, Sharlene, during press conferences, and acted as a buffer to the media and wider community once Tim’s body was found. But he didn’t do it alone.
One of the fundamental tenets of Jesus’ teaching and preaching was that it demanded a response.
In September 2011, Rev. Gordon Haynes, then the associate secretary of Canada Ministries, was assigned a “research project to provide a report for the Life […]
Over the past six years, I have been in literally hundreds of churches. Many are in gradual decline and are searching for solutions to reverse direction. Sadly, almost all are going about it in exactly the wrong way.
Doubt has become a dirty word in church. As if to say, “I’m really not sure,” somehow derails the whole enterprise. The Record’s Andrew Faiz met with Tom Allen and Rev. Will Ingram to talk about this thing we church people don’t like to talk about.