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Articles by Todd Watermann
Let the Lord Tend the Night
CT Pastors When our four children were between 2 and 6 years old, we would hear feet on the stairs nearly every night from our bed. We tried, for amusement, to guess which child by cadence of footfall. A little face with big eyes would appear at my bedside. We delivered what was needed to get back to sleep—song, blanket, dry pajamas, snuggle, explanation of the weird sound—tangible reassurance of our presence and care. They came with needs they could not meet within themselves.
Libby’s Last-ness
CT Pastors Libby was the matriarch of close family friends of ours growing up. Her kids told me that she taught them that the host always goes through the buffet line last. There were many buffet lines. Her father owned a meat processing company which made the Koegel hot dog, a staple food for Michigan folks. From employee picnics to family dinners to society events, Libby and her family were front and center but always at the back of the line.
Balaam and the Prophetic Task of Preaching
CT Pastors Preaching is a scandalous enterprise. As Isaiah reminds us, preachers are individuals of “unclean lips” who bring a word from the Holy One to “a people of unclean lips” (Isa. 6:5). Preachers are not chosen by God due to their moral superiority, but rather because he has providentially elected to entrust his word to “jars of clay” (2 Cor. 4:7).
Gloriously Independent
CT Pastors “Your life and everything in it are unnecessary. You are not necessary.” I sat in my chair with slumped shoulders, stunned. I went to seminary to be encouraged, and these were the first words out of my professor’s mouth. I believe the phrase, What have I done? might have popped into my head. Few thoughts cause us to bristle and react more strongly than this one. Our modern sensibilities are constantly pushing against the idea that we are dependentcreatures.
Casting Pictures into the Imagination
CT Pastors “A picture is worth a thousand words,” so the old aphorism goes. When someone asks about our vacation or a joyous life event, we may say, “Let me show you some photos,” as a means of opening the experience to them. However, in our image-laden society, I wonder if the power of pictures is becoming less impactful as time goes on.
Loneliness: A Dead-End or a Doorway?
CT Pastors It was friendship at first sight despite lockdowns and social distancing. Our daughters hit it off at a park near our homes, and so did we. Years of pent-up desire to share our ruminations on podcasts, books, philosophy, and religion surged out of us. We exchanged numbers. Every few months we’d take our daughters to the park again. Each conversation was as meaningful as the last. I slowly, but deeply, connected with my “pagan” friend (he likes this term).
Interview with Dr. Christian Miller, author of The Honest Crisis
CT Pastors Dr. Christian B. Miller is A. C. Reid professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Project Director for The Honesty Project. If you were to rank honesty in a list of virtues, where would you put it? In his new book, The Honesty Crisis, Professor Christian Miller calls it “our most treasured virtue.” He also considers it among our most endangered.
We Need Good Guides
CT Pastors Adapted excerpt from The Pastor as Gardener: A Renewed Vision for Ministry. By Matthew Erickson In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we learn of a powerful enchanted ring threatening the collective peoples of Middle-earth. After the ring’s discovery, representatives of various peoples eventually agree it must be destroyed by traversing torturous difficulties to cast it into the fiery depths of Mount Doom, where it was forged.
Political Faithfulness in a Polarized Age
CT Pastors My wife and I recently finished watching The Office. In season eight, a new CEO named Robert California draws a diagram dividing employees into two columns and leaves the notebook open where everyone can see it. This single action creates chaos. Factions form. People differ over how to interpret the columns. Jim Halpert even calls the diagram a mental Rorschach test because everyone projects their professional insecurities onto it.
Redeeming Pastoral Loneliness
CT Pastors “In many congregations, the preacher is one of the loneliest members.” Dave Bland spoke these words at our seminary’s preachers’ conference. Ouch! I thought. As a minister, I am mostly mindful of others in the congregation who seem solitary and disconnected: widows and widowers, shut-ins, newcomers, those who seem socially withdrawn. It hadn’t occurred to me to turn the camera back onto myself, but Dave’s words made a sounding somewhere deep within me. Ministry can be lonely work.
Anxiety About Affiliation
CT Pastors It was a powerful moment for me as a new lead pastor. I was sitting in a room with more than 100 ministry leaders in Phoenix, watching pastors from across the theological spectrum gather around an Anglican priest preparing to move to a new city. Reformed, Anabaptist, Methodist, and Baptist. Complementarian and egalitarian. Men and women. Leaders from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. They laid hands on him and prayed. I remember thinking, This is what I want to be part of.
Preaching from Difficult Passages: Habakkuk
CT Pastors One Sunday morning, a Kenyan ministry partner, who was serving as a guest preacher in my church, began his sermon with these words from Habakkuk 3: Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. (vv.
The Strike Zone of Discernment
CT Pastors I opened my eyes in time to see the ball land in a patch of kudzu behind the left field fence. My father—our coach—leapt from the dugout. “TAKE YOUR BASES, SON!” he shouted, swinging his arms over his head and wrapping me in them when I crossed home plate. Somehow, I’d hit a home run—the only hit I ever got in Little League. Deathly afraid of getting beaned, if the ball came the least bit inside, I jumped from the batter’s box like a cat on a hot stove.
The Drop In - CT Pastors
CT Pastors For 55 summers, Trevor Sargent had come to the same family cabin, sat on the screened porch, and looked up at Mount Columbia’s granite, pines, and patches of winter snow. It dared him to summit. He’d always found a reason not to. This time he was out of excuses—and out of company. Linda was here but wasn’t interested in a pre-dawn departure. Some of the fellas from church might have been up for the climb, but none of them were able to make it to Colorado this summer.
College Students Feel Shallow. The Church Can Provide Depth
CT Pastors We live in an age of self–indulgence, from self-care routines, to social media algorithms curating our every swipe, to the advertisements that promise our best life is one purchase away. Modern life sends one unrelenting message: We are the center of the universe. This rhetoric is meant to empower, and yet a cursory glance at the headlines reveals that this message of self-centeredness is not working.
Persuading Like James
CT Pastors This is the fourth in a series of articles by Jeffrey Arthurs on the persuasion approaches in various parts of Scripture. Previous articles focus on Jesus, Luke and John. James is peppered with analogies, metaphors, and concrete examples. Here are a handful, randomly choosing one per chapter: The rich will fade like a wildflower that withers as the scorching sun rises (1:9-11).
Persuading Like John
CT Pastors In previous installments of this series, we have considered “Persuading Like Jesus” with the lesser-to-greater argument and “Persuading Like Luke” with his use of eyewitness testimony. Here we look at John’s use of ethos in his three Epistles to encourage, remind, warn, hearten, and fortify his “dear children” (1 John 2:1).
College Students Feel Meaningless: The Church Can Provide the Solution
CT Pastors It has been said that if we want people to know the truth, tell them; but if we want them to lovethe truth, tell them a story. Stories have a way of, as C.S. Lewis famously quipped, “stealing past those watchful dragons.” We live in an age of self-serving virtues. The common refrains of “you do you” and “live your truth” reveal the values of our culture and the stories we tell about ourselves.
Defining Moments in Preaching
CT Pastors “It was a moment I’ll never forget for as long as I live.” We have all heard this expression—and most of us have used it. But when was the last time you actually experienced such a moment? In his sermon “If I Should Wake Before I Die,” Tony Campolo recalls one from his childhood, a story he first shared during a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania: I told the class about the time I went to the top of the Empire State Building in New York City.
Music at Midnight: The Supreme Value of Mercy
CT Pastors George Herbert, a poet-priest in seventeenth-century England, walked two miles every evening to the large cathedral in Salisbury. As a rural pastor serving in the small hamlet of Bemerton, this nightly ritual had a specific purpose: to join the cathedral’s evensong service and make music in its high-vaulted sanctuary. One day, Herbert arrived at the cathedral covered head-to-toe in mud.
Good Expectations
CT Pastors “Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises.” —William Shakespeare Ten years ago, I became the full-time preaching minister at my congregation. Prior to this, I preached occasionally, maybe a few times a year. I enjoyed the great boon of being novel. No matter how bad a guest preacher is, that person will be granted some hearing simply because of the difference. When I stepped into the full-time role, it was with part-time speaker expectations.
On Finding Sacred Space in the City
CT Pastors At a recent lunch with some fellow pastors, I was asked a question about what kinds of resources would be helpful for me and my church. “Honestly,” I chuckled in response, “if you know of any billionaires who can buy us a building, that would be great.” The other pastors laughed along—at least one of them was in the same boat. We planted our church three years ago and, as many church planters in certain communities know, space is the perpetual issue. Where are we going to go?
The Weight of Calling
CT Pastors The budding branches of the Northern Red Oak and English Elms stood at attention around the Williams Quad. It was a perfect May morning for a commencement ceremony. Daniel stood patiently while she inspected his regalia. “Mom, I’m not the valedictorian.” Nearly a thousand graduates, and all he could feel was her relentless pressure. He knew that exacting gaze; he had met those eyes a thousand times. His entire life consisted of three base motivations: appease, avoid, escape.
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