Were I a betting person, I would bet that by this point in the summer (at some point, at least) you have been outdoors without shoes on your feet. Maybe it was a trip to the lake. Maybe it was in your backyard. Maybe it was during some water-play with children. But it likely happened.…

Director of Music / Piano Accompanist Department: Worship Arts Reports To: Senior Pastor Job Type: Part-time Summary: Community Baptist Church (CBC), an American Baptist Church in Warrenville, IL (30 miles west of Chicago), is seeking a part-time Director of Music / Piano Accompanist to lead and grow our music program. This role involves close collaboration…

American Baptist Churches USA elected Joshua Kagi to serve a two year term as President of the Denomination, beginning on January 1, 2026. Below is a video of his remarks at the Biennial Meeting earlier this month.  

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,…

As I hope you realize, there is a lot about these Christian spiritual disciplines that that simply cannot be included on Sunday. My goal is only to make introductions, a bit like connecting people who do not know one another but I suspect would benefit from doing so. I trust God to grow the “relationships”…

Given our focus this week on prayer and the current realities of the world, I thought I would share another prayer by Douglas McKelvey as my Friday offering, this one titled “A Liturgy for Those Flooded by Too Much Information”. It reads in part: “Guard us then from shutting down our empathy or walling off…

We’ve been sitting with meditation this week as a way of sitting with God. As part of my effort to lead by example, I thought I would share some from a journaling exercise I did, coupled with meditation on a piece of artwork: “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” by Hokusai in 1831. Before I start…

We began our journey learning about and practicing the spiritual disciplines this past Sunday. And since we had not yet begun to explore a particular discipline, I encouraged you all to practice “awareness,” insisting that awareness is one of those ways of seeing that grows with practice. My expectations in commending this practice to you…

It is relatively common in churches to talk about gifts. We talk about spiritual gifts like those mentioned in Romans 12 (as one example). We talk about gifts in terms of cultivated talents like musical prowess or public speaking. We talk about gifts in terms of financial contributions. We even talk about the gift of…

On my father’s side of the family, my people hail from West Virginia. Due to information not being passed on before the death of elders and the burning of a church that held all the family records, that is a bit of a genealogical dead end otherwise. My grandfather grew up on a mountain in…