After church, early in my first pastorate, Peter stopped me at the door. He said, “Tom, you have a problem in your preaching.” My countenance fell, but I kept listening. “You say ‘you’ too much, instead of ‘us.’” He was right, and his assessment was profound. The lesson permeated my whole career. Peter was a…
On the morning of August 18, at around 4:00 AM, the Christian community of Loretto, Pakistan, witnessed the wall of St. Cecilia Church vandalised with an Islamic inscription. The wall marks the entrance to the village and stands next to the founding stone engraved with the words “Welcome to Loretto.” Loretto is a small village…
“My breathing patterns change daily,” Seerveld emailed me on July 24. “Often within a day. It has been bad.” He then fell asleep in the Lord on August 5, 2025, four days before his 95th birthday. I combed through some of his writings to bring some of the pieces of his life together. Cal Seerveld’s…
Our church is in the middle of a library renaissance. It began when my wife and I were going through its books and found that 80 percent no longer served our congregation. After much sorting and recycling, we are learning that physical books – paper and ink, words and images – still have a big…
I love my church. Every Sunday service begins with naming the First Nations people of the land we’re standing on. One of the first pieces of art a visitor will see is a painting of an Indigenous mother holding her child. Another one is of a dark brown Jesus, holding out communion bread and a…
This October, representatives from more than 300 denominations, all members of the World Council of Churches (WCC), will gather in Egypt to celebrate the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. The creed this council produced in 325 AD begins, “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things…
There’s been a lot of drama in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) these past few years. I could use a break; maybe you too? The CRC has suffered self-inflicted wounds. We’re losing churches and pastors. We’re short on trust, and all we have left is procedure. We haven’t found ways to give and receive forgiveness,…
The Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) held its annual general assembly in Canada last month, the first time Synod has met north of the 49th parallel since 2012. In his opening address to the delegates and guests gathered at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario, the CRCNA’s General Secretary Zachary King said that 34…
Location, location, location are the principles of real estate value. Context, context, context are the fundamentals of interpretation. When context is ignored, texts are manipulated to fit an agenda. This is what happened with the Christian Reformed Church’s Synodical Human Sexuality Report (HSR). It has caused chaos in the denomination. Literary Context The first context…
I got chatting with a fellow mom at a parent-and-tot drop-in in my neighbourhood recently. She asked me casually what I do for a living. I took a deep breath, smiled and answered, “I’m a pastor. Like, at a church.” She gave me the same confused look I’ve seen many times by now. Rest assured,…
On March 13th, I arrived at my office to find all of my filing cabinet drawers ajar and papers scattered on the floor. The safe behind my chair was busted open with a lock cutter. “My office looks like a crime scene,” I exclaimed to my only in-person co-worker, Pastor Joel Ringma. “Because it is,”…
Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), also called “gag orders” or “confidentiality agreements,” were originally designed to protect trade secrets and proprietary information. Emerging during the tech boom of the 1990s, NDAs served a legitimate purpose in Silicon Valley: keeping sensitive business information out of competitors’ hands. Over the past three decades, however, these agreements have spread far…
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