Category: Listening
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Staying at the Table Together: Communion During COVID as a Global Conversation
As we are prevented from celebrating Communion together in person, may we seek to stay at The Table together in other ways.
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Power Exists to be Given Away – Reminders from Movement Living
Power exists to be given away. The reminder of this came as I listened to the Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson preach at the historic Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn via podcast last week, in a sermon entitled “Another World.” I hit pause when I heard her words, “It’s that exousia power that we…
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Stand With Us Now: An Appeal to My Generation
“Well, we’ll have retired by that time anyway,” they laughed. I remember the first time older clergymen joked with me about the predicted inevitable decline of our denomination, and the reality that it would not be their problem. It would be ours – my generation’s problem – and in that moment, in their joke, it…
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You can play with me
“You can play with me,” a little voice said to me from the other side of the slide. It was my first day at a new school, and when recess came, I had fled to conceal myself under the big metal slide on the far edge of the playground. Turning my head, I looked up…
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Body Taken Into Custody
“Why didn’t the women go to prepare the body right away?” my brilliant Jewish friend asked me yesterday as I tried to explain what Easter meant to me. “Huh?” This wasn’t the way that I was trained to think about the three days in the tomb, but it seemed rather obvious to someone who had…
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What are you fighting for?
Riding my bike along the narrow inches of shoulder between the paved road and the deep ditch, I struggled not to fall in the water, and thought about the children I was told had walked these same treacherous trails to come to church. It was about a decade ago, and I was in my first…
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When the hand that held you holds the stone
“I miss my dad,” I thought looking down at the creamed chipped beef on the plate in front of me in the Thunderbird Cafeteria outside of Canyon de Chelly. The last time I had seen my father, he was looking down over the railing into the entryway of the Dome in St. Louis where I…
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Grief on the Margins of UMC General Conference
Amidst the concentric circles that sat within The Dome in St. Louis this week, it was the outer ring that leaves my heart hurting most as I walk away. We gathered for this Special Session of General Conference to discuss human sexuality and bring to a conclusion the battle that had raged in the church…
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When Celibacy Conflicts With Faithfulness
Most young clergywomen are familiar with the predictable conversation that takes place when people encounter us for the first time in the wild. Scrunching up their face in puzzlement at my clergy collar, the woman cutting my hair, or the man ringing up my groceries will almost inevitably ask, “So can you get married?” In…
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The Table of Man
At the back of the hotel ballroom, I stood shaking from my encounter with the Spirit. Outwardly composed, the pen I held in my hand betrayed my secret, resisting being steadied each time I tried to set it to the page. I had just stood on the stage with simple straw basket and cup, and…
Hannah Adair Bonner 