Welcome from
Eric O. Ledermann
Hey! Thanks for stopping by. Pour yourself a cup o' jo, take a load off your feet, and check out what's here. You are looking at my ramblings about issues of faith, life and culture—they are my own and are not necessarily shared by those with whom I work, live or otherwise engage.
Heck, a week from now I may not even agree with what I write here! The Spirit of God is always moving; always shaping and reshaping, transforming and re-forming, each of us according to God's hope and vision for humanity. I hope we may be able to listen, pay attention, and respond faithfully. To steal a phrase from our UCC sisters and brothers: "God is still speaking."
Feel free to share your comments and engage in any conversation that may be happening here, but just know that I do reserve the right to delete any spam or anything I deem inappropriate or offensive. I look forward to dialoguing with anyone who cares to dialogue!
Peace and blessings,
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I just read a blogpost by Carol Howard Merritt entitled “Generational Roadblocks: What sort of obstacles keeps a new generation of people away?” Carol is an amazingly prolific and prophetic writer about contemporary themes of church and young people (she mostly blogs for the Christian Century and Huffington Post). In this latest she outlines a number of fairly well known statistics about the declining membership of mainline protestant denominations—like my own, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). She goes on to list a number of very real issues with the current state of things, focusing primarily on the PC(USA). I can’t argue with any of her arguments—she’s right-on with everything she says.
I also recently read Landon Whittsitt’s book, Open Source Church: Making Room for the Wisdom of All, in which he contrasts the current predicament of churches and the [...]
Tomorrow is the day we give thanks—as though we don’t have to give thanks any other day. Tomorrow, our entire nation gathers with family and friends to feast and fellowship—except for those who do not have jobs, who are living on the streets, who have no family, or are otherwise struggling with personal issues they cannot shake so no one really wants to be around them. Tomorrow, we celebrate the amazing voyage of the pious Pilgrims who left the safety of their mother land in order to live in religious and political freedom—that is, until they forced their way of life on others who came, and even claimed some of them witches when these others would not conform to the lifestyle and religious practices of the majority so they drowned them, stretched them, and did all sorts of other horrid things in the name of “religious freedom” and Christ. Yes, [...]
In Matthew 19, a young man approaches Jesus and asks what he must do to have eternal life (see also Mark 10 and Luke 18). Jesus responds with a list of some of Moses’ commandments from Exodus and Deuteronomy. But the young man persists and tells Jesus he has done all that, and then asks what else he must do. Jesus responds with this:
21Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.� (NRSV)
Understandably, in my mind, the man walks away “grieving� according to the NRSV, “for he had many possessions.� Jesus did not say he had to sell everything. Jesus did not even say he had to sell everything in order to “have eternal life.� [...]
I have had the rare opportunity in the past several weeks to have several conversations with different people about the concept of “witness” within the Christian context, none of which were initiated by me. In the Christian tradition we give witness to the reality of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, though the language may differ among Christians in exactly how we do that. In legal terms a witness is someone who observes an event and is then called upon to give testimony about what they saw—which brings up another word with some baggage around it: ”testimony.”
In some traditionally liberal churches “giving witness” is not part of our regular vocabulary, and in fact the term can provoke an at least somewhat distressing response. Why is that? Are we not called to give witness, to share our experiences of the risen Christ? Are we not called upon to share with the world the gift of God’s grace revealed [...]
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