By Kelly Johnson

• Don't Panic (The End is Good News) by Kelly Johnson (11/8/2016)
  ...rld will come to an end, for each of us and for all of us, and this both terrifies and fascinates us. People love stories about the end of the world. The long winter is coming, meteors hurtle toward earth, zombies overwhelm civilization. Such stories indulge our wish to be heroes. The thrill of adrenaline blows the cobwebs off our humdrum little everyday routine, and we can abandon the confusi...
• Slavery and the Cost of Discipleship by Kelly Johnson (8/31/2016)
  ...s in today’s gospel. Paul’s “dear friend and co-worker” Philemon, a believer whose faith Paul praises, had a slave. It shocks us now to realize that the early Christian communities included not only slaves but also slave-owners. Being baptized did not automatically mean that a slave-owner would free his or her slaves. And this is not because ancient slavery was a humane institution. Slavery me...
• Planning Our 2009 Gathering by Kelly Johnson (1/19/2009)
  ...uck us was less the importance of any one passage and more the importance of the scriptural story as the story of God’s economy. Or to put it another way, what struck us was the idea that the true economy is the work of God.<!--more--> Our word ‘economics’ is related to the Greek word <span style="font-style: italic;">oikonomia</span>, which refers to household management. (The Greeks had a sep...