Preaching is the art of telling the truth with love.

My goal in worship is to nourish, equip and inspire.

Worship must nourish the spirit: provide the healing and sustaining bread of life that we all hunger for, and that some of us need to make it through each week. To do this, I lead worship that regularly offers opportunities to grieve and rejoice. Celebrating and mourning, especially in community, dissolves the blockages that build up in our hearts and spirits, and that can clog the flow of life living through us.

Worship should equip us with the spiritual, emotional and intellectual tools to live our personal and collective callings in the world. Worship should be empowering, reminding us how we can resist the forces of domination and empire that wear away at our lives and our planet. Relevant and meaningful worship equips our community to live faithfully in paradise here and now, to face suffering and struggle with a mature hope and resilience.

Worship that inspires offers an opportunity to lift our eyes to the horizon and see beyond the day-to-day entanglements and stresses of our lives. We need to understand ourselves as part of a larger story, to be reminded of our own depth, and meaning and purpose. Worship can make the unseen visible, opening us to revelation and sparking new possibilities. And it must help us to use the despair and outrage we feel at the state of the world around us to fuel our passions—to reconnect us with our capacity to make beauty and be of service in the face of it all.

Worship is a collaborative art form, a collage I work on each week with other professionals, lay leaders, and ultimately the whole congregation. My work as a ritual artist is to help weave the whole together, to share the skills of creating and leading worship, and to ensure our services are enriched with as many voices and vantage points as possible. Preaching is the element of this worship collage that I have apprenticed myself to as my craft. In the conversation I’m in with the congregation I serve, my work is to say something that matters each week, grounded in both truth and love.

I plan my sermons in arcs around a central metaphor. Here’s a recent example of what I send the worship team to start planning:

Belonging to a Reflective Community

  • Rearview Mirror

    Nostalgia and regret, 20/20 hindsight, memory and history. Our lives are laced with reflections of the past. What’s in your rearview mirror? Are there people, moments, or feelings that keep popping up? And when we gaze into the rearview mirror of our common life, what insights are reflected back to us?

  • Bathroom Mirror

    Wherever you turn your gaze inward, each of us finds ourselves confronted again and again with the intimate challenge of our relationship to ourselves. What still small voices have we ignored? What will we have to practice to bring them into our conscious reflections?

  • The Mirror of the World

    The Jewish high holidays commence and the world calls out with beauty and need. The water reflects hands and faces as we drop breadcrumbs to release the old year and welcome the new. How might our reflections on the state of our wider community inspire us to live out a deeper calling with joy?

  • Curve-in-the-Road Mirror

    We know future is always full of uncertainty. But sometimes someone sticks one of those round mirrors up on a tree at just the right spot to illuminate a blind bend in the road. As we try to catch a glimpse of what is coming down the road, how can our reflections on the future inform and equip us in the present?

  • The Mirror in the Minister's Office

    As we reflect on this developmental ministry and the search committee prepares to interview ministerial candidates, what have we learned about the role of the minister? Our anabaptist cousins on the radical end of the reformation, the Quakers, decided that the authority of professional clergy was destructive to the purpose of religious community. Despite our ambivalences and uncertainties, we’ve decided to keep ministers around. How come?!