How many congregations? What’s the Sunday attendance? What’s the membership? How many members in the denomination? How many have left? How many are left?

Head count takes up our attention in the church, just as it does in many organizations. We need people to do the work of the church, and we need their support. [...]

We brought Java home, an enthusiastic bundle of fur, and got him acquainted with his crate. Every night he’d be tucked in with an old towel and something to chew. Each morning, we’d let him out, and stand back ruefully as more dog than we started with emerged.
Of course we wanted him to [...]

Last month the Texas Conference of Churches held its Third Annual Celebration of Christian Unity, this time at The Sanctuary in Austin. The event is an opportunity for musicians, storytellers, visual artists, etc., to present their take on “Expressions of Faith”. They can choose anything as long as it’s family friendly and fits time and [...]

I’ve been thinking about ecumenism through the framework of intentional religious communities.

We don’t all have to live on a farm, raise chickens and share our soup bowls for this kind of intentional community. We can share a general geography, or even an online social relationship as our basic bond. Committing to pray for and [...]

We Christians self-sort. On Sundays, more likely than not, we can be found with people who are very much like ourselves – who speak the same language, share the same skin color, understand the nonverbal culture of a particular kind of worship, and who know the words of the same hymns (or should I say, [...]

Advent. What are we waiting for?

I was talking today with my Wednesday morning text study group about the difficulty of using traditional Christmas (read: Winter) imagery here in Texas. My experience of growing up in Massachusetts with leafless trees, darkness driving to work AND coming home, black ice, etc., is a world away from [...]

There are days, maybe even months and years, when we just don’t feel it. Faith is not a steady unchanging companion for most of us. Like all relationships, our relationship with God is dynamic. That means there are times when we just don’t get along.

Because we tend to encounter God and what we know [...]

What does God look like to you?

At the Texas Conference of Churches, we understand ourselves to be a catalyst organization. It is our job to bring Christians together so that they can tell their own stories of faith in their own voices, hear the stories of others without filter, and encounter one another in [...]

The Texas Conference of Churches is a 43 year-old-ecumenical organization. Most people don’t know the word “ecumenism” so my bumper sticker answer for what we do at the TCC is, “We help Christians play nicely together – in Texas!” People usually laugh, then shake their heads and make a comment to the effect that we [...]

The August 2012 issue of The Lutheran has as its cover story, “Spiritual Nomads – a blueprint for young adults in ELCA congregations”. Reaching out to 20/30-somethings who self-identify as Spiritual but not Religious is a big topic right now. The Texas Conference of Churches’ upcoming 2013 Assemblies (one in Fort Worth, the other in [...]