There’s a charming old picture of the hoary Universalist church in Oxford, Massachusetts with retail space on its ground floor and the meeting-space above. Wise, that. Empty churches — by which I mean the buildings — are bad stewards no matter where or when they are, and these days...

I often think about little-bitty churches. They have fewer than two dozen in worship and worship might be twice a month or less often. It may be the one thing the congregation does with regularity, and it comes with a mix of pride and anxiety. Of course, I also tend to think of the surviving Christi...

Growing up a Southerner, I didn’t get the heavy dose of Lincoln adulation so many Americans in other parts of the country do. Perhaps that’s why the endless references to the sixteenth president by the forty-fourth are lost on me, any why I only get interested in the man when the subject...

Ze Frank has two thought-provoking posts — pointed more at the techies but well suited for the church crowd — called “Simple questions to ask when planning a contribution-based project” Parts 1 and 2. Church has its own technology, unrelated to equipment and electronics. It&#...

If I had to develop a DIY training plan for ministry leaders — especially Unitarian and Universalist Christian ones — I would surely include the PBS Frontline series “From Jesus to Christ” (1998) as a resource. I had just finished my seminary education the year before, and wa...

The Religion News Service reports that a group of Christian leaders called Christian Churches Together in the USA — representing 43 groups and denominations, collectively representing 100 million Christians — met with President-elect Obama “to make poverty a priority of his adminis...

Steve Caldwell ( Liberal Faith Development ) put the proposed bylaws amendment — a.k.a. the new Principles and Purposes — at his site. I don’t think they’re great and I don’t think they’re horrible, and it much better than the earlier draft. I know the revision st...

Or ordained for the second time, but as so much with early Universalism, the first was irregular enough to be legally suspect. John Murray was the minister of the Independent Christian Church, Gloucester, Massachusetts; the record of the ordination follows after the jump, from Universalism in Glouce...

British Unitarian minister and blogger (CAUTE) Andrew Brown announces the Christmas Eve service at his church, the Memorial Church (Unitarian), Cambridge. You may download PDFs of the Christmas service, within which communion service takes place. I scratched my head in a couple of places. First, I&#...

The longer I ponder a response to Barack Obama’s invitation of Rick Warren to give the invocation at the Inauguration, the less likely I’ll be to finish it. So here’s the nub. An aside to Mr. Obama: We know you’re not a liberal, but a lot of liberals, labor people, environmen...