In experiencing God’s love and Jesus’s welcome at the communion table, I had found a way to be Christian that makes sense to me, a way that is deeply transformative and gives shape to my life.

It includes loving the world as God loves the world. It includes affirming Common Grace, the grace that God has for all humanity. It is rooted in tradition and history, but is not afraid to grow into the future. It includes beauty and hope and commitment to a strong center that is not fenced but is dynamic, fluid and open.

Finding Presbyterianism, expressed as many people are living it in the contemporary age, played a big role in my re-engagement with and embrace of Christianity.

God is bigger than our thoughts, theories, and concepts. But nevertheless we wrestle with and use thoughts, theories, and concepts to try to draw closer to God. One Old Testament scholar introduced me to the idea that theology is calculated verbal idolatry. Every thing we say about God risks idolatry if we think our words and ideas can actually express, let alone contain, God.

But we take the calculated risk of engaging theology, because we long to better understand and feel connected to that which is Holy, the Holy God of Creation.

If you’re interested, I encourage you to read more about the work I do as pastor of Grace Commons.

As a pastor, I feel the need to re-present Christianity to seekers, sometimes in new ways, and sometimes in very old ways that have been forgotten. In doing this I know I represent Christianity, Christ, and the Christian tradition. I’m not up to the task. But I do the best job I can.