Gary Walter is president of the Evangelical Covenant Church. One challenge for a monthly column is timeliness. Given lead time, a piece might not be printed until weeks after a significant event has taken place. That delay can also be […]
Columnists
Removing the Static, Hearing God’s Voice
Have you ever noticed that every month, most shelter magazines feature one or two articles about getting organized? It used to be the big January feature after the Christmas haul, but lately articles about de-cluttering appear regularly. Entire magazines are […]
Marks of a Denomination
At a recent gathering of leaders from several denominations, I was asked to talk on “what makes a denomination a denomination.” In other words, if you dropped an ounce of denomination into a spectrometer, what chemical ingredients would be revealed? […]
What’s in a Name?
Papal transitions have two points of public anticipation: first, who it will be, and then, what name will that person choose. The point of taking on a new name is to subsume one’s personal identity to a set of values […]
Preserving Our Pollinators
I love the insects that populate my backyard. I’m not above plopping down on the grass and peering closely to watch a bumblebee browse the clover. Bees come in all sizes. Some are solitary, some live in hives. Some are […]
Women in the Church
Mother’s Day is this month. Not every woman is a mother, but every mother is a woman so let me use this occasion to give thanks to God for the central contribution of women in the life of the church, […]
Trends
A study on Protestant denominations was recently released based on figures compiled by Association of Religion Data Archives. It tracked attendance growth and decline for the years 2000–2010. Of the twenty-seven larger Protestant denominations, which grew the fastest? The Covenant. […]
Be a Better Steward of Your Food
I used to toss perfectly good leftovers into the trash or flush them down the disposal, usually because I was in a hurry, living a fly-bythe-seat-of-my-pants life. Then I read a startling statistic. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans […]
Persecution
It is hard to grasp that the mere act of reading this column could get you ostracized, arrested, tortured, or killed. But the reality is, in parts of the world the persecution of Christians is fact. And it is increasing. […]
Rachel’s Weeping
I find myself still sighing deeply over the massacre of innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Societally, we have gone through a collective emotional concussion, disorienting and nauseating, which are the two symptoms I remember from my […]
Facing the Future with Faith
I remember several years ago when my kids convinced me to green up my life. They were learning about recycling in school and regularly chastising me that I didn’t recycle more. I had always been a bit of a “nature […]
Hymns
Somebody once said the best book of theology many will ever read is a hymnal. That means some of the best theologians who have ever put pen to paper are hymn writers. We need a big worship vocabulary to worship […]