N.T. Wright on Reading the Bible

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Church Under Water

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I spoke to Pastor Linda Bibb this evening. She’s the outgoing pastor at Salem Church where I have been appointed effective July 1. Salem is just a couple of blocks from the Cedar River in downtown Cedar Rapids. She told me they were evacuated from the church building at 4:00 pm yesterday. The wonderful people of this congregation worked together sandbagging and moving as much as they could to the second and third floors. But the river was too much. Linda said the water is at least 8-10 feet deep at the church building. There is a car port over one of the entrances and the water is above that car port. So the water could be to the second floor now. This picture from the Cedar Rapids Gazette shows how high the water was earlier today at the Dairy Queen which is right across the street from Salem United Methodist Church. Unfortunately, the river hasn’t even crested yet so the flooding will probably get worse. We will attempt to get to Cedar Rapids tomorrow. In the midst of all this we ar...
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This Is What Happened

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General Conference, our global family reunion that speaks officially for The United Methodist Church, just concluded last night. This was a specially called session of 864 delegates (half lay, half clergy) from all over the world to discuss and act on the report of the Commission on a Way Forward over the issue of human sexuality. Two of the plans presented had the most support: the Traditional Plan as well as the One Church Plan, which was endorsed by the Council of Bishops. The One Church Plan would have given each local congregation and pastor the authority to make their own choices regarding same-sex weddings based on their cultural context. In an emotional, contested, rancorous, yet majority decision, the General Conference chose the Traditional Plan. The vote was 438 to 384 (this doesn’t equal 864 as some of the international delegates did not make it to St. Louis because they didn’t get visas). The chosen Traditional Plan basically keeps the current language in our ...
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We've Been Here Before

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Thanks to  Press Features   for sharing their work on Unsplash. We’re coming up on seven months in this COVID-19 pandemic. We canceled in-person worship the first time on March 15. This experience has been difficult for many and continues to get more bleak. The coronavirus has now sickened more than 33 million and killed more than 1 million people globally. Our country, for the moment, has the most confirmed cases and the highest death toll with over 200,000 virus deaths. The number of cases and deaths in our state continues to rise. Without doubt, this is a difficult moment. Still, the reality in the church is we’ve been here before. The 1917–18 Spanish flu was the most fatal pandemic in history. A hundred years ago it killed more than 50 million people. Churches in some parts of the world were shut for a year. And before that, we know the great church reformer, Martin Luther, dealt with fatal epidemics every few years. None of that may have happened in our lifetime, but we h...
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