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Co-missioners,  Here’s some information you’ll want to know about, I think.  Peace and Joy, Jerry Burce, Co-editor for the Crossings Community    ___________________________________________________________________________    Unearthing Hidden Riches: A Crossings Update   by Jerome Burce    I’ve babbled before in this space about the riches that lurk in our …

Co-missioners,  Today’s contribution comes to us in an unusual format. It is a brief email exchange between a pastor and his bishop on a theological matter that is close to the heart of many of you. I want to thank Steve …

Co-missioners,  Our aim this week is to thank God yet again for our late colleague, Lori Cornell, and then to thank God all the more for the Christ whose company she was keeping when she died a month ago today.   That was on March 25. Her funeral took …

Co-missioners, I preach extemporaneously, which has the disadvantage that I cannot share my manuscript with anyone who didn’t hear the sermon live. But sometimes I take notes, such as this past Good Friday. And sometimes I flesh them out after the fact. So …

Co-missioners,  Today I’m following a nudge from my co-editor, Robin Lütjohann, to recycle a piece I wrote ten years ago. It addresses two details in the Gospel for this coming Sunday, John 20:19-31. Both are commonly mishandled in treatments of this text, or so …

Co-missioners,Here are some seasonal musings emerging from a rich conversation at the delightful Zoom-based text study group organized by David Kukelhan et al. I give full credit to the members of that group for any original or amusing insights in this peace. A very blessed …

Co-missioners,  I live these days in the northeast corner of Ohio, twenty miles south of Lake Erie and fifteen miles west of Pennsylvania. I started serving in 2024 as a supply preacher for my ELCA synod. Most all the congregations I’ve …

Co-missioners,  Here is another artifact from last January’s Crossings Conference, the manuscript of a sermon preached at our gathering by Pastor Jack Busche.Mindful of the conference’s theme of wrestling with the relationship between the Gospel and “Christian behavior,” Jack warns us …

Co-missioners, I was planning to have something else for you today. It was going to be a Lenten lament about what seems to be some changes in the way the church I’m institutionally connected to is talking about God these days. I’m hearing less of the language …