The Roofless Church

Category: “We”

  • Become a We: The Quickest Path to Healing Relational Wounds

    Become a We: The Quickest Path to Healing Relational Wounds

    “Become a ‘We’ as fast as you can.” Of all the advice that my father gave me in the 32 years that he was physically in my life, this was the most important. When he was dying from Multiple Myeloma, something awakened in him that transformed the way he saw reality. All of the time…

  • How Do We Live When Paradise Burns?

    How Do We Live When Paradise Burns?

    Just a week before the fires that devastated Lahaina, and ultimately Maui, all of Hawaii, and the world, I said goodbye to the banyan tree at the heart of that place that has become almost sacred to me. I literally spoke to it in my heart and thanked it for enduring as long as it…

  • You Can’t Help Yourself

    You Can’t Help Yourself

    I grew up with a single mother who was friends with other single mothers. Several of them had their own businesses. I often heard them bashing men and saying things like, “I don’t need a man to be happy.” While ontologically true, many of them attempted to enter into relationships with men or other women…

  • What are In-Divide-You-Alls? 

    What are In-Divide-You-Alls? 

    What are In-Divide-You-Alls? I have never met an individual. I’ve met people who live as if they’re individuals. And I’ve tried and failed to be one in an effort to understand a concept that fundamentally makes no sense to me. But I’ve come to see that it didn’t work because I just can’t feel my…

  • The Story You Refuse to Hear May Be Your Own

    In a recent sermon called, The Search for the present Christ, I challenged my community to reflect on the image of Afro-Cuban artist, Harmonia Rosale’s work, I Exist, which features a black woman on the Cross. I asked them to do this not because I was trying to be provocative in the shock value sense,…

  • Developing A Sense of True Identity

    Developing A Sense of True Identity

    If the nations of this world all die eventually, I imagine the official cause of death would be from complications due to the identity struggles of their citizenry. I get no pleasure out of making that statement, but I cannot ignore that, as far as I can tell, the divided world seems to be in…

  • An Open Letter to Red Hats

    Dear Red Hats, I’m sorry. What can I say? There’s no excuse. I must confess. I’m a hatist. Confession is the first step on the road to redemption and I need to be redeemed. My understanding of my Spiritual discipline (Christianity), which many who wear you also profess, teaches that there is no fear in…

  • Who Is Qualified for True Love?

    Who Is Qualified for True Love?

    When I first decided that I was going to be a Christian, I knew that the endgame for me was being able to live the love of Christ expressed in the Bible. How I knew that I would have arrived was if I could–with a genuine heart–say the words, “Forgive them for they know not…

  • When One “ism” Ends, #Embracism Begins

    When One “ism” Ends, #Embracism Begins

    Racism doesn’t exist. There I said it. Now we can move on. Don’t you wish it was that easy? What if we could uncreate racism or all of the other divisive isms just as easily as they were created and create a new way of being together?  Let’s call that effort #embracism.  As I define…

  • Can You Be Racist In the Dark?

    Who is a racist? In the wake of the election results, there are a lot of people who feel fear that our country has gone backwards and that somehow racism had receded and now, because of one man, it has reemerged. I understand why, but as I see it, what is happening is that we…