Every time I come to the Collect for St. Luke the Evangelist, I feel like it in some ways it not only lays out something that’s important, but it also gently takes me by the front of my shirt and says, “Come on, you can do this, too.” A Continuing Ministry What do I mean?…

Albert John Luthuli, a black native South African, was a deeply committed Christian man. He was, in fact, the child of Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries but was eventually confirmed and commissioned as a lay preacher. And it was in this context, with a focus on evangelism, that Luthuli came face to face with this truth: If…

Have you heard of what’s called the Serenity Prayer? It was penned (or at least the story goes) by Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor at Union Seminary in New York City in 1939 and made popular, of course, by Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact, one of AA’s founders, an Episcopal priest named Sam Shoemaker, helped introduce the…