The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers serves as Canon to Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry and spearheads Episcopal efforts concerning evangelism, reconciliation, and creation care. Her newest book, The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline and New Hope for Beloved Community (March 2021), follows her popular titles Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other and the Spirit of Transformation and The Episcopal Way. Spellers has served as chaplain to the Episcopal House of Bishops, directed and taught mission and evangelism at General Theological Seminary, and served as a canon in the Diocese of Long Island. Before that, she founded The Crossing, a ground-breaking church within St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston, and led numerous church-wide renewal and justice efforts. A native of Frankfort, Kentucky, she and her husband Albert deGrasse make their home in New York's Harlem neighborhood.

A highly respected scholar and public intellectual, the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones is the sixteenth President of the historic Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The first woman to head the 182-year-old institution, Jones is a past president of the American Academy of Religion, which annually hosts the world’s largest gathering of scholars of religion. Jones came to Union after seventeen years at Yale University. She is the author of several books including Trauma and Grace and, most recently, her memoir Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World. Jones, a popular public speaker, holds deep grounding in theology, politics, women’s studies, economics, race studies, history, and ethics.

A highly respected scholar and public intellectual, the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones is the sixteenth President of the historic Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The first woman to head the 182-year-old institution, Jones is a past president of the American Academy of Religion, which annually hosts the world’s largest gathering of scholars of religion. Jones came to Union after seventeen years at Yale University. She is the author of several books including Trauma and Grace and, most recently, her memoir Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World. Jones, a popular public speaker, holds deep grounding in theology, politics, women’s studies, economics, race studies, history, and ethics.

The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers serves as Canon to Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry and spearheads Episcopal efforts concerning evangelism, reconciliation, and creation care. Her newest book, The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline and New Hope for Beloved Community (March 2021), follows her popular titles Radical Welcome: Embracing God, The Other and the Spirit of Transformation and The Episcopal Way.

Over and again in the New Testament, we hear that we can’t disentangle what we believe about God from how we live with other people. In fact, we often learn what we really believe about God in the way we treat others.

After retiring as rector of St. Bartholomew’s in Manhattan, Buddy Stallings wondered what church for him would look like going forward, even pondering life with very little church involvement. To his delight, no matter how maddening the church sometimes can be, the church—all it is and longs to be—continues to live at the center of his life. As a priest, his path to God has been most vividly illuminated by the experience of God in others: we bear God to one another. His consolation and hope for the world rest in that conclusion. Stallings believes the marriage of an ancient faith and the postmodern world, though tricky business, is the mission of the church, a mission which can be realized only in the gritty reality of love for God, one another, the planet, and ourselves.

We come to claim Ash Wednesday as the stand-in for the unknown anniversary of the day when the fires will go out and there are only ashes. We do this not out of a sense of gross morbid curiosity, not to wallow in dark fascinations, but as O’Donohue says “to gather ourselves / and decide carefully / how we now can live / the life we would love / to look back on…”

After retiring as rector of St. Bartholomew’s in Manhattan, Buddy Stallings wondered what church for him would look like going forward, even pondering life with very little church involvement. To his delight, no matter how maddening the church sometimes can be, the church—all it is and longs to be—continues to live at the center of his life. As a priest, his path to God has been most vividly illuminated by the experience of God in others: we bear God to one another. His consolation and hope for the world rest in that conclusion. Stallings believes the marriage of an ancient faith and the postmodern world, though tricky business, is the mission of the church, a mission which can be realized only in the gritty reality of love for God, one another, the planet, and ourselves.

Jesus not only heals the son from his demon, he also works to heal the disciples and us from our addiction to knee-jerk reactions and quick fixes. He invites them and us into the slower and more fulfilling path of taking the time to listen to God and each other.

What are we spreading as Jesus’s Church? Is it the same old judgment and condemnation the world’s violent battles are made to arouse in us? Or does what we have to offer the world have a different source? A source that is mercy. A source that is love. Gift. Forgiveness. Give these away with your life, says Jesus, especially to your enemies and opponents, and these are what will come back to you and fill up your life. And when a good measure of some small mercy we’ve managed to give away, pressed down, shaken together, running over is put back into our laps, won’t we wonder why we spent even a moment of these short and precious lives of ours spreading anything less?