Beyond Belief
Leadership Is An Activity, Not A Position
Browse the list of summer youth camps at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and parents are bound to find something to suit just about any childhood personality. There are classic youth activities for softball players, theater performances for emerging actors and trendy Lego camps for the STEM-obsessed. The Jewish Community Center, situated…
Leadership is Risky
When Pastor Adam Hamilton embarked on a series of sermons about Moses last year, he knew the gravity of his message. Hamilton knew his call to action had the power to change the lives of children and families forever. So he started at the beginning. Inside Leawood’s United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, the nation’s…
Anyone Can Lead, Anytime, Anywhere
Pastor Adrion Roberson likes to say that youth sports founded his church in Kansas City, Kansas. He has spent 25 years coaching youth football in Wyandotte County and founded the KC United! Youth Sports Initiative – a league that has grown to 65 teams in several Kansas City-area communities. He launched it so working parents…
The Importance of Engaging Beyond Your Usual Circle
When Kansas City Oasis, a nonreligious fellowship, first partnered with a religious organization to serve meals to the needy, some Oasis members expressed concern that their secular group could become fractured. Would the separate factions find shared connections? Would they breach one another’s beliefs or boundaries? These days that concern is hard to remember. The religious group –…
Tireless Activist Battling Back After Being Hit By Car
The day that a car shattered Steve Israelite’s body in September, he was in a crosswalk on 63rd Street heading to the Panera Bread in Brookside. While there, he planned to check his e-mail because he was early for a meeting with our mutual friend Julie Warm, co-director of the UMKC Service-Learning Program. Steve’s injuries…
Calls for Peace, not Pacifism
It was dark and cold outside Saturday as celebrants filled the venue on Kansas City’s West Side. But this crowd was not gearing up for a party in the final hours of the year; it was instead a predawn gathering at the Rime Buddhist Center for the city’s 31st annual World Peace Meditation. [FLEX-CONTENT] By…
Seminaries Part of Metro’s Secret Sauce
Religion in the United States has been in transition for decades, as the percentage of the population identifying as Christian shrinks — and particularly as the religiously unaffiliated population has exploded to nearly 25 percent. The effects have rippled through the Kansas City area’s several seminaries and colleges that offer religious education. “The cultural challenges…
Resurrecting A Neighborhood
As the early Sunday morning service at Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church let out recently, Deacon Roosevelt Hall was happy to explain the large round button pinned to his lapel. “I’m committed,” it read. Yes, Hall said, it was about the 121-year-old congregation’s recently launched building renovation project. But that’s not all Metropolitan’s members are committed…
Commentary |Walls That Unite
One morning in June 2007, I stopped by the construction site of a Habitat for Humanity house in the 3700 block of Flora Avenue and noticed that work had come to a temporary halt. As I explained soon after that in a Kansas City Star column, someone at the site had noticed that something didn’t…
D.C. Building Gains Dollars, Doors Via KC
To enter the huge new Museum of the Bible when it opens this fall just off the National Mall in Washington, D.C., you’ll have to go through Kansas City. Not literally, but almost. That’s because the amazing 40-foot-tall bronze doors — a replica of the bed of Johannes Gutenberg’s press from which he printed the…