It’s All About Tradition

Spoiler alert coming: Ask a Methodist to tell you how Christians honor and celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, and you’ll hear pretty much the same thing from all of us. Traditions like waving palm fronds on Palm Sunday and having sunrise services on Easter morning are so familiar to so many of us, it may have never entered our minds that there are Christians whose services and rituals are completely unlike our own. And guess what? They’re just as traditional—and important—as ours.

Bunnies, Eggs, and Jesus! It Must Be Easter!

Easter is coming and the stores are filling their shelves with bunnies, eggs, and Easter baskets. The items are bright and inviting with themes from Disney characters to superheroes. But as Christians we often wonder, “What does this have to do with the real meaning of Easter?”

The Physicality of the Resurrection

The Christian faith, taking its cues from Jesus, is insistently material, corporeal, anthropomorphic, muscular, and incarnational. “The Word became flesh.” God’s Word has become a person, a person in motion. Jesus is God Almighty daring to get physical; God with a body, a body in action. After his body was brutally crucified, Jesus moved, not out of a body but rather into a body of a very different sort.

Remembering a Mockingbird

Harper Lee never enjoyed being in the spotlight. It’s not because she shied away from telling a powerful story, but because it’s hard to be the focus of the spotlight while focusing the light itself. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is more than the greatest American Novel; it is an unassuming vessel in which the Gospel walks around in our own skin. It’s one thing to hear the parable of the good Samaritan from the pulpit or bible study, and know that we should be a neighbor to all, but inviting my Deep South neighbor into a familiar Maycomb courtroom so that our holy imaginations can expand beyond our cultural assumptions, changes the very images we see when we close our eyes and think of the “other.”

Lee taught us how to tell our own story through Scout’s adventures, to meet violence with a lamp, rocking chair, and a newspaper, to question our assumptions that we just know are true, and to never fear reaching out to the graceful and mysterious Boo Radleys of the world. A book is a funny thing. The words on the page are bound together with spine and covers, but the idea within it is as timeless and unbound as Lee herself is as she now rests in the heart of God. Lee suggested that a mockingbird simply sings a song for all to enjoy, but the song she sang continues to disrupt our neat Maycomb lines in which we want everything to fit and know its place. Harper Lee will be missed, but her story will continue to focus an incarnational light shining toward justice.

 

Matt Rawle is the Lead Pastor at The Well United Methodist Church near New Orleans, Louisiana and a graduate from the LSU School of Music and Duke Divinity School. He is also the author of Faith of a Mockingbird.

 

Social Media For Churches 101

Whether you avoid using the Internet or spend all your free time on Facebook, being put in charge of your church’s social media accounts is a major responsibility. Let’s go over some social media basics and give you a few ideas about how to best use these networks for your church’s benefit.

First Things First: Fighting The Technology Obsession

Wake up. Roll over to shut off the alarm clock on your phone. Notice that you have fourteen new emails — and one is from Twitter. Check your retweets. Snap a photo of the sunrise through the window. Open Instagram to choose a filter. Hit send. Check your texts. And finally, stumble to the kitchen for coffee.

Your day might not begin like this, but I can guarantee that someone you know has a morning routine that’s eerily similar to the one I just outlined. Technology has changed our lives in all the obvious ways, of course, with faster communication and touch-of-a-button convenience. By now, however, you may have already realized that it’s been subtly transforming our lives in the little things, too. Technology allows us to stay connected anytime and anywhere, but has convenience started to consume us? A quick glance around a restaurant, airport, or coffee shop will confirm it: We are technology-obsessed.

Is Your Use of Social Media Undermining Your Christian Witness?

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other forms of social media are terrific ways to share what you are thinking with your friends and family. And commenting on other people’s posts is a great way to encourage and befriend them. Social media is also a wonderful means of sharing your faith with others. Unfortunately, there are times when our use of social media actually serves to undermine or discredit our Christian witness.