The Crossings Blog

Co-Missioners, Four weeks ago we sent you the treat of an essay by Carol Braun on her calling as a patriot. Today Carol reflects on her calling as a parent with an unusual degree of depth and perception. Anyone who shares that calling will resonate to what she says. Readers under 40, as Carol is, will ...

Co-Missioners, Tumult followed a political rally in North Carolina last week. It prompted our editor to vent. Peace and Joy, notwithstanding The Crossing Community Our Christian Shame: Massive, Endless, Unspoken By Jerome Burce The current occupant of the Oval Office instigated another flood of impassioned ink last week. The man has a knack for this. Possessed of a middle-school mindset, sulky ...

Pain is an enduring feature of the world the Holy Spirit dispatches us to as bearers of Good News. Now and then we’ll meet a person whose pain is great and unrelenting, stretching over years. To speak credibly of God love’s in Christ to someone like this is a daunting challenge that ties all too ...

Co-Missioners, Two weeks ago we sent you the first half of an extensive appreciation by Steven C. Kuhl of Ed Schroeder’s theological legacy. Steve presented this at a memorial event in St. Louis on June 1. Today we pass along the rest of what he said. See below. On a related note, with bitter death and June ...

Co-Missioners, Carol Braun, our former co-editor of Thursday Theology, keeps intensely busy these days with her callings as spouse, parent, and teacher of mathematics and physics. Such “down time” as she enjoys is restricted to a few weeks of summer. We intruded on that by asking her a few months ago to offer some thoughts for ...

Co-Missioners, Some fifty or sixty people met in St. Louis on June 1 to reflect on Ed Schroeder’s legacy as a teacher and colleague. A number came, per invitation, with thoughts to share on the topic “What I Learned from Ed.” One of them was Steve Kuhl, the former president and executive director of Crossings. Steve ...

Co-Missioners, We are suddenly in the second half of the church year when Sundays are numbered after Pentecost and the unrelenting focus of the weekly Word is on the particular mission to our 21st century world that the Triune God used a first-century Pentecost to enmesh his church in. To refresh and whet your mission-minded thoughts, we ...

Last week we sent you the first installment of some reflections by Felix Meylahn, in 2017, about the import of the Reformation for the church’s life today. Here is the second and final installment. Keep your eye peeled especially for Pr. Meylahn’s understanding of what the church’s mission is about. If any of you have ...

Co-missioners, Today, June 6, we catch ourselves looking back to Normandy beaches littered with dead and mangled bodies. That’s what you get when human beings respond as they must to eruptions of gross and appalling evil. The greater the evil, the more bodies lie mangled. Today we also look ahead to a celebration of Pentecost this coming ...

Co-missioners, Today is the Feast of the Ascension. With that in mind we send you to our library for another splendid item that’s been collecting cobwebs for a while. Our editor, Jerry Burce, ran across it by accident last week. A reference to Cyrus the Persian caught his eye. If you’ve been following the efforts of ...