Yes, I'm a minister. No, I don't have a church.

(This post is the second in a series. The first post in the series is "Caveats & Privilege," which you can read here .) Dear Fellow Business Travelers, Don’t be a jerk. No, I’m serious. Don’t be a jerk. This goes for all travelers, not just the business ones, and not just the ones who are Christian. I do think that being a Christian means acknowledging that all people are children of God. All people are sacredly human. And we are radically equal in terms of our created-ness. Here are a few examples of how to live into that belief that God’s creation is sacred. A flight attendant once told me one of his least favorite things a traveler can do is hold up her or his trash without looking up at the human being collecting said trash. Just because someone is there to serve you (and arguably, flight attendants are there for way more than to serve you) doesn’t mean you get to ignore them. It’s rude. Also, you know enough not to yell at a flight attendant,...

I will begin with my usual caveats. First, yes, I’m about to talk about what we might call Upper Middle Class Problems (or Upper Middle Income, but most don’t think about the difference between wealth and income, so I’m trying to keep it simple). This might seem ridiculous in the face of the reality that the vast majority of the world’s population will never see the inside of a plane. But I’m talking specifically here about a small portion of the world’s population: those who travel for work. A whole lot of us live in the U.S. Probably a quarter of my friends are like me: business travelers. Upgrade-hunting, frequent flyer mile-hoarding, million-miler, spending real money on high-quality luggage, hotel point-collecting business travelers. Now that I work at one of the six agencies of a mainline denomination. While I travel a lot, my travel schedule is paltry compared to the travel of many of my colleagues. I have many colleagues who fly to all corners of the world, not just the U....

Below are the remarks I gave today at Whitworth University in Spokane, WA at the Third Moderator's Conversation on Unity with Difference on Race, Gender, and Religious Differences (more information here ). I include some suggested resources for continued conversation. Presentation Summary: Being church together is challenged by the ways in which various church communities and individual church members interact with power based on race and gender, not to mention class status and regional identity. The church, particularly the PC(USA), includes people with diverse capacities for a real conversation. Through exploring the place of Asian Pacific Islander Americans (who in the PC(USA) can check either “Korean” or “Other Asian” for demographic information on some forms) and others dislocated by the black-white binary in church and U.S. society, together we seek a way to move forward toward being a church that allows for complexities of identity and addresses real inequalities. Int...