The Miller Spotlight

I was talking over lunch today with Nancy, a wise friend and collaborator of mine, who worked with many special needs' children, as a reading specialist, for 30 years. As usual in our conversation, issues related to justice-seeking and conflict in the church came up. I told her that one of my greatest concerns is the  discomfort with anger , which so many seminary graduates have told me nobody ever dealt with even in seminary.  "No wonder it's difficult to abide with conflict," I also wrote in an email to my pastor this morning, after last Sunday he'd so eloquently addressed anxieties going on here in Lawrence, Kansas, in the community of faith right now because of divisions about how to set priorities and spend massive amounts of money: some seeing no better way than to double the size of our county jail thru increased sales taxes, which are already oppressively-high and do not even provide mercy to the poorest among us by exempting food! The mercy, as t...

Somewhere in the last fifty years, the word "evangelical" took on an entirely new meaning. So much that I've finally thrown in the towel. Given up. In great despair. It was the one word I thought I could hang my hat on forever as long as I was interested in proclaiming what I understand to be the Good News of Jesus Christ. That understanding has evolved, I'll admit, since I began singing "Jesus Loves the Little Children," long before I knew this song was about far more than small children like me. I now understand Jesus differently than I did at age three--hopefully everyone acquainted with Christianity does. So how does that make me unique? By the time I was ten, I understood as well as I do today that the message of Jesus was all-inclusive. Though I was a middle-aged adult before I fully understood what "inclusiveness" means. In all of this evolution until now, in the eighth decade of my life, I have cringed at the stereo-typing that places...