Jake Owensby

Oct 3, 2023 | ministrymatters.com | Jake Owensby

Self-care has become a lucrative industry. We spend billions of dollars on oils, apps, and fitness programs that claim to enhance our physical, spiritual, and emotional wellness. Observing the results of these products and these techniques among her patients, psychiatrist and author Pooja Lakshmin concludes that the self-care business doesn’t deliver on its promises. Her patients are at least as stressed and insecure as they’ve always been.

Aug 22, 2023 | ministrymatters.com | Jake Owensby |Michael Beck

After Sunday worship at one of the congregations in my diocese, I met with the church’s leadership for the standard review of finances, attendance figures, evangelism strategies, and the like. One of the leaders was visibly angry. He said nothing until we came to the “Other Business” item at the end of the agenda. Referring to my sermon, he said, “Where do you get off telling us to love our enemies? They’re our enemies! They’re dangerous.

Aug 22, 2023 | ministrymatters.com | Michael Beck |Jake Owensby

We drove for miles along old US Route 301 through the sprawling tangled underbrush, swamps, and forests of the North Florida heartland. It felt like the space had been somehow unaltered by time and “progress.” We journeyed deeper into the backwoods, wild beauty untouched by suburban sprawl. My wife and children, urbanites all, found ourselves seemingly in the middle of nowhere. No post office. No stop lights. No gas station.

Aug 9, 2023 | ministrymatters.com | William McDonald |William Mcdonald |Jake Owensby

Many Christian traditions have much to say about the relationship between liturgy and life. Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, and Anglicans together have a multitude of liturgical theologians and thus a rich treasury of wisdom from which to draw in describing the liturgy-life relationship. Do Wesleyans have insights about how liturgy and life in the world outside the weekly assembly might relate? Surely we have a goodly heritage in this area, beginning with the poetics of Charles Wesley.

Aug 9, 2023 | ministrymatters.com | Jake Owensby |William McDonald |William Mcdonald

The movers had finished unloading the van after sunset. Joy and I had gotten up early to get a jump on the unpacking. I was desperately searching for the coffee maker when the phone rang. It was our realtor C-. He said, “I need to ask you a question.”Thinking that he needed information to complete some form or other, I kept tearing open boxes and said, “Well sure. What’s up?” It hadn’t occurred to me that C- was a member of my new congregation, not as our realtor.