Who cares about the Eucharist and liturgy?

Just about everyone I meet these days.

This year I’ve led several retreats for worship leaders from highly innovative, non-denominational churches. At each, the same question came up over and over:

Can you tell us about the liturgy and the Eucharist?

Maybe folks ask me this question because they’ve read one of my books. They know the story of my Roman Catholic childhood, my founding and leading a non-denominational church for ten years, and how my hunger for a richer sacramental life led me down the Canterbury Trail and to the Episcopal priesthood.

Maybe people [...] Continue Reading →

Rob Bell, the best-selling author of Love Wins and Velvet Elvis endorsed my new book Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me…a Memoir of Sorts. Rob writes:

“Ian is an absolutely magnificent writer, and this memoir is a stunning work. With Miles Davis and squirrels and weddings and Red Bull and fawns and cliff diving—it’s like he has this bottomless bucket of images and metaphors and they’re all so spot-on brilliant. The prose is light and loose and free, and then there are these moments when there’s just so much soul right on the page. I literally had to put the [...] Continue Reading →

His name was Eric. He was 28, a part-time carpenter, and a full-time volunteer with Young Life.

Eric was gentle, funny in an understated way, and confident without swaggering. He occasionally let himself be the subject of a sentence, but rarely for long. He was far more interested in knowing what was happening in your life. His syntax was selfless, his grammar self-forgetting.

My father was an alcoholic, unpredictable and demeaning. Eric was the first adult I trusted enough to talk to about the chaos and fear that made up the soundtrack of my adolescence. After Young Life Club he would drive [...] Continue Reading →

I spent this weekend facilitating a retreat for fifty men from GracePointe Church in Franklin, TN. It was wonderful. The guys were everything you hope retreatants will be–welcoming, open, curious, engaged, and willing to go wherever God seems to be leading in the moment.

A retreat guide is different than a weekend speaker. A retreat guide is tasked with creating the natural climate in which people are most apt to have a lived experience of God. He or she also has to discern in real time what is happening in a group and follow the promptings of the Spirit, even if [...] Continue Reading →

I haven’t been blogging much lately as I’ve been traveling a lot. I’m currently at Catalyst in Atlanta where I had a great time doing this interview with Brian Wurzell and Bianca Olthoff today.

From here I’m headed to Willow Creek up in Chicago to participate in their worship gatherings this weekend. Later this month I get to a be a part of a couple of retreats – a men’s retreat at GracePointe in Nashville, an artist’s retreat at Laity Lodge in Texas, and the Refuge Retreat on St. Simon’s Island. If you’re going to be at any of those lovely [...] Continue Reading →