When preparing this sermon, I didn’t realize that this Sunday was baptism Sunday as well as All Saints. I’ve been an Episcopalian for 25 years, I should have. But my sermon today starts with the best theologian I know, in a very appropriate way for a baptism Sunday; my 10-year-old daughter, Emma.

Since Alban’s publication of The Practicing Congregation in 2004, when I first wrote about my research on vital mainline churches, hundreds of clergy groups and church leadership gatherings have invited me to share with them insights on what makes for a good congregation.

With James Dobson and major conservative evangelical leaders threatening to bolt the Republican Party if Rudy Giuliani is nominated for president, conventional wisdom about God and politics has been turned on its head. For the last 25 years, conservative evangelicals could reliably count on the Republicans to choose a candidate acceptable to their version of Christian politics. This year, however, the leading Republican candidates seem unable to articulate any convincing religious message, much less a strongly biblical perspective on issues. All the while, the three leading Democratic candidates can testify to personal faith, possess robust theological views, and ground many policies in broadly biblical principles.

The Rev. Dr. D. James Kennedy, the Christian Right leader Rolling Stone magazine described as “the most influential evangelical you’ve never heard of,” died yesterday in Florida of complications from a heart attack. His passing, only months after the death of Jerry Falwell, signals the generational shift of leadership now occurring in evangelical Christian circles.

While the rest of the world buried its collective nose in Harry Potter last weekend, I spent my time reading early Christianity. It proved a tough call: The fate of Hogwarts or the Roman Empire? I chose Constantine over Voldemort.

I am not a total geek, but I am writing a new book on church history for progressives. One problem of classical liberalism was its rejection of tradition and the inability to ground its vision in Christian history. The past was seen as imperfect, full of injustice and mistakes, and incomplete understandings of nature, humanity, and God. Thus, liberal Christians embraced the future as the major arena of God’s activity—tending to privilege what is new over what was old.

When I was a girl in the 1960s, one of my favorite parts of summer was Vacation Bible School at St. John’s United Methodist Church of Hamilton in Baltimore. That, of course, makes me sound like a church geek—as if I was eager to go to church five days running instead of only on Sunday. But it was not the five days I looked forward to; it was the weeks before when my mother prepared for VBS.