Faith
The Christianity Spectrum: Local Millennials Share How They Do Church
Chantell Smith was sitting on the couch in her apartment flipping through the channels when she saw the news. A gunman had entered a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine people. She felt defeated. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “That was the one where I was just like, ‘What is…
Understanding Islam in KC
At 79 years old, Marian Thomas is as inquisitive now as she was as a Sunday school student. She asked curiousKC: “What are the range of beliefs/practices within Kansas City’s Muslim community from ‘conservative’ to more ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’?”
Covenant Presbyterian Church Steps It Up In Kansas City’s Urban Core
One day last year Berta Washington wasn’t feeling well. So she went for a blood pressure check at Covenant Health and Wellness Center near 60th Street and Swope Parkway in Kansas City, Missouri. It was 86-over-69. “Me being a black female,” she told me, “that was heart attack time.” She quickly went to her doctor…
Court Experience Exposes Anti-Islam Sham
In 2012, Kansas passed a law forbidding courts in the state from making any ruling based on foreign law. Critics widely — and accurately — viewed it as the product of a campaign by anti-Islam bigots who were hyperventilating about Shari’a, sometimes called Islamic canonical law. Those bigots spread the alarm that Shari’a would replace…
Bet You Didn’t Know ‘Amazing’ Religious Archive is So Close To KC
You may be surprised to learn that the first King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611, came in “he” and “she” editions. No, one wasn’t for males and one for females. Rather, in the book of Ruth, one translation said “he went into the city” in verse 15 of chapter three, and one…
Faith And Love
Churchgoers at a tidy, white-steepled United Methodist Church in Carrollton, Missouri, heard a frank admission from their guest pastor one spring morning in 2007. “When asked to preach this Sunday, I almost said no,” Priscilla Wood Neaves told the congregation. “Why? Not because I lacked training and experience, and I have always enjoyed preaching.” She…
Hospital Chaplains Deliver Spiritual Care
Right from birth, this baby was sick, in trouble. “Her mother immediately asked for prayer and was very optimistic,” Kathie Knehans, then a chaplain at Children’s Mercy Hospital told me. So Knehans prayed with the family. And even when no family members were present, Knehans, now retired, visited the child and prayed. When the still-hospitalized…
Using An Old Custom To Lure New Parishioners
For the last half century, membership numbers in Mainline U.S. Protestant churches have gone mostly in one direction — down. Protestants once constituted a large majority of the American population. And Mainline churches — the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ, the Christian…
(Faith)fully Serving Listeners
Virtually every Sunday morning for more than two decades, the Rev. Robert Lee Hill has left his Brookside home before sunrise to make his way to the studios of KCMO radio. The live talk show he co-hosts with Rabbi Michael Zedek and Bill Scholl of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas has also become…
Righting A World Turned Upside Down
When Mindy Corporon turned 45 in August 2013, life was good. Really good. She was chief executive officer of Boyer Corporon Wealth Management, the business she co-founded in 2007. She was happily married with two great kids. Her parents lived nearby and were terrific grandparents. When she turned 50 a few weeks ago, almost nothing…