My newest book is out!

Ordinary Preacher/Extraordinary Gospel: A Daily Guide for Wise, Empowered Preachers.

Packed with stories not just about preaching but about my amazing gospel-congregation--the ordinary people around me who live out the gospel in such amazing ways.  

This book is not just for preachers but everyone who cares about living out the gospel.  

People listen to lots of sermons.  Here's a book that'll help ordinary Christians understand what it's all about and how they can live in such a way that they are preachers too.  

"This book is filled with courage and discernment . . . Empowering." --Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary

"Neufeld-Erdman writes wisely of the daily disciplines necessary to sustain the art and practice of preaching." --Debra Dean Murphy, author of Teaching That Transforms

Spread the word.  

The book is a fully revised, updated version of my 2007 book (Countdown to Sunday), with new chapters too.

Why do so many refuse to "dance"?

Many people have asked to see this visual meditation again (I used it in a recent sermon on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount).  So here it is.

Glennon Doyle Melton, author and blogger, gets real about her brokenness--her addictions and abortion and the way she screwed up the first half of her life.  And she challenges the legalism that's invaded so much of the Christian church--those who not only refuse to dance in the grace of God's forgiving love, but who refuse to let others dance in it as well.

She so memorably says, "Grace is the only buzz I have left, and they'll take it from my cold dead hands."  

Here's a witness to the reclamation of the gospel of Jesus in a day when it often becomes a cold, hard, brittle, and imprisoning weapon in the hands of well-intentioned but misguided legalists.

Putting playfulness back into life

Here's another of the films I used among my ministry students recently, but so timely and appropriate for any of us who feel the stress and strain of daily life today.

To avoid clergy burnout--and the burnout any of us can feel when we are working too hard and with too few margins--we need to challenge so many of the assumptions we hold dear . . . the ways that drive us in our families, work settings, and religious communities.

Jean Vanier says, "Life is about relationship and fun, not winning medals."  But too many of us seem to be out to win gold--at great expense to our bodies and relationships.

What does it mean to infuse life with more playfulness--a playfulness inspired by the great spiritual vision of Jesus?  

And what will it take for us to change our lives and our communities?

What must we give up? (a great Lenten question!)

And who are the people who can teach us the way? (see the video for a surprising answer; it's not those most of us look to for answers)

Shame and Vulnerability: A Lenten Meditation

Here's a video I showed recently to my ministry students at Fresno Pacific University/Seminary.  We were exploring the nature of clergy burnout and the forces that impel ministers toward poor health.  It's a needed meditation for anyone who's human and any community that wants to help people into the vibrant humanity offered by God through Jesus.

Brene Brown offers an insightful meditation about the nature of community; she explores our need to create spaces where we can truly sit with pain.  

This isn't easy in contemporary life, even inside communities of faith where such deep work ought to be common.  In my quarter century of pastoral experience, creating spaces where pain can be shared honestly and held reverently is the vital work of being a pastor.  And if we follow in the way of Jesus, it is the vital need for Christian communities today.  

Trouble is, we both don't want to do it and we don't know how to do it--even though there is no let up in the pain we are experiencing in our lives, and that this space is precisely what the gospel hopes to create in our world.

Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW has spent the past decade studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness and shame. Brené's 2010 TEDx Houston talk, The Power of Vulnerability is one of the most watched talks on TED.com, with over 7 million views. Since then she has appeared on Today, Katie and Oprah Winfrey'sSuper Soul Sunday.

There is a deep beauty within you. Seriously.

Photo by tinyenormous

I've got to say a little something about the beauty of our humanity.  Yours.  Mine.  Everyone's.

I said things kinds of thing last Sunday in a sermon.  And it struck a chord.  It seems there's a darkness and heaviness that lies heavy over a lot of us.  Maybe this is a time when seeing the beauty of ourselves is, for a lot of us, particularly difficult.

And so, to convey something of our essential beauty, I'm exploring the words of two witnesses to this beauty:  Jesus Christ and Dante Alighieri.  Jesus likely doesn't need an introduction, but maybe Dante does.  He's the thirteenth century Italian genius, who's epic poem, the Comedia or Divine Comedy, may well be the ultimate masterpiece exploring the inner work of spiritual transformation.

Dante begins his vision of the path of inner, spiritual transformation with these words:

“I woke to find myself in a dark wood.”

The spiritual journey is a journey, often dark and frightful, to discover what is within us all the time. 

And what is within us?

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5).  He means that there is within each of us a light that comes from God and will never be put out.  The problem is that there are forces in our lives that have distanced and disconnected us from that light—the parent who told us that we’d never amount to anything, the relative or neighbor who abused us, the loved one who abandoned or neglected or betrayed us.  These kinds of things lead us to believe false things about ourselves—things opposed to the truth Jesus tells us about ourselves.  

“You are the light of the world,” says Jesus.  But we say, “You gotta be kidding.”

Jesus means to open us to a deeper truth too long hidden from our eyes.  He means to soften the hard ground, to give light within where too much darkness abounds, to bless where shame and pain hold us in an inner prison.  Sin loves the shame the shrouds our souls.  Sin exults in the pain that blankets the inner light.  Sin is the great deception that would lead me, for example, to believe that I’m worse that I really am.  Of course, it can also lead me to believe, in a self-inflated way, that I’m better than others. 

The work of transformation isn’t easy work.  It’s a journey from darkness to light, from falsehood to truth.  It means suffering—for all that is false and ugly must be pulled from me.  The things I cling to, the things that hold me captive must go—my illusions about myself, my addictions, my failures . . . all this must go, and none of it will go without a fight.

Embracing the truth about myself, the light I hold within me, will mean that I must journey through suffering into wholeness, from ugliness into beauty, from fear into wonder.  It’s a journey into the depths of my beautiful, God-breathed soul—a soul made by God, cherished by God, held by God.  It’s a journey into freedom.  But that I have trouble seeing that beauty doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.”  

Something inside me scoffs and hisses in my head, but something else within me hopes and wonders.

Am I?  Are you?

In a dark wood it’s hard to see anything at all.  And so, we, as did Dante on his journey into the depths of fear and pain, will emerge in paradise, through suffering, to find the light Jesus says was there all the time.  Dante ends his great poem with these lines:

“As in a wheel whose motion nothing jars/By the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

That love and light is within you and me, it holds the center of our lives.  Our spiritual work is to become what we, made in God’s image, already are and will more fully become . . . sooner or later.