Peripatetic Pastor

Category: Thoughts and Reflections

  • A WORD FOR THOSE WHO CANNOT BELIEVE: FAITH AS ENCOUNTER

    In the Bible “faith” rarely means “belief”—at least, not in the sense that “belief” has come to have in popular Christianity: what I will call “belief about.” We are not saved by belief. This is not what the Bible teaches. But if my experience is at all representative, this is what many in church think…

  • A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION

    Christmas is never the New Testament’s first thought. The stories of the birth of Jesus are found in only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke. Our Christmas celebrations and songs are narrower still, mostly from Luke. Matthew’s account we slip in and around the Luke story as best we can, putting camels in our…

  • WHAT HAVE WE LOST? THE CHRISTIAN REFORMED CHURCH POST -SYNOD 2022 (Part 1)

    In the larger scheme of things, the dissolution of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), should it eventually happen, is ecclesiastical small potatoes: one more immigrant denomination absorbed into the morass of American evangelicalism. But it makes me sad if for no other reason that for many years, in the old prizefight metaphor, the CRC hit…

  • PASSION

    When I arrived in Grand Rapids in the middle 60’s, the locals called him “Littlefaith.” His name was Duncan Littlefair. Littlefair, the Reverend Duncan Littlefair, was for 35 years, from 1945 to 1979, pastor of Fountain Street Church in downtown Grand Rapids. Fountain Street was a large and flourishing congregation under Littlefair’s leadership, filled with…

  • LISTENING TO SERMONS THE MUSINGS OF AN OLD PREACHER

    These days I listen to sermons more often than preach them. There was a time when that would have been difficult for me. I was preaching virtually every Sunday, sometimes three times: the same sermon twice in the morning and a different sermon in the evening. When I was not preaching, I didn’t want to…

  • SMALL KINDNESSES: AN ADVENT MEDITATION

    In 1985, Robert Fulgham wrote an essay that later became the bestselling book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1990). It went viral. Fulgham’s premise was that the simple rules that children learn in kindergarten serve just as well in adult life, such things as: Share everything.Play fair.Don’t hit people.Put things…

  • CARL

    The announcement came electronically, as they do now, in the mail I regularly receive from the denomination. It was a death notice, this one like so many lately, of someone I knew. The announcement said that Carl Kromminga had died at age 96. Carl was my teacher in seminary. He taught Practical Theology, the applied…

  • NETTIE

    NETTIE

    We had a hard time finding her grave. We were in the Tahoma Cemetery in Yakima, Washington, on the eastern side of the Cascade mountains, an area known for its fruit and wines. We were looking for my great-grandparents, Charley and Nettie Libolt. The map of the cemetery didn’t seem to help much. We knew…

  • POETRY AND OLD BOOK STORES
    September 2021
    Praise Music

    In a town east of here we happened on a used bookstore. We weren’t sure at first it was still in business. It looked abandoned. But the door was ajar, and we went in. Books and old magazines were everywhere, boxes and boxes of them overflowing in random stacks. The shelves you expect in bookstores,…