Book Review: “Useful Wisdom: Letters to Young (and Not-So-Young) Ministers” by Anthony B. Robinson

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Book Review: “Useful Wisdom: Letters to Young (and Not-so-Young) Ministers” by Anthony B. Robinson, Cascade Books, 2020. (Link to the book at Wipf and Stock here.)

By Richard L. Floyd

This little book is well-titled, for it is both useful and wise. In the interest of transparency, let me say that I have known Tony Robinson as a friend and interlocutor for decades. During that time, I have admired his many writings, which are clearly and concisely written, and grow out of his pastoral experience and long years as a church consultant. Continue reading →

A Reflection on Forty-Five Years of Ordained Ministry

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On this day forty-five years ago, September 21, 1975, I was ordained into the Christian Ministry of Word and Sacrament at the Newton Highlands Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts. I was 26. Continue reading →

Dudne M. Breeze (1938-2020) A Remembrance

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Greetings from the Berkshire Hills. I’m Rick Floyd and I’m Pastor Emeritus of the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

It will be 50 years ago next year that I walked down the Andover Newton hill and took the MBTA from Newton Centre to Newton Highlands for a job interview to run a coffee house at the Newton Highlands Congregational Church. Continue reading →

Forty-five years in Ministry and I’m Finally a Televangelist! My YouTube Debut.

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I filled in to lead worship for my pastor daughter today. Her amazing worship team put together an engaging and inspirational multi-media worship experience unlike any I have ever been a part of. It’s a new world we are living in, and my message was about how I have taken the lessons I have learned from my brain injury to think about life after the Pandemic. How we might use our religious imaginations to see what “new normal” might look like, because in the life of faith there is no going back:

“It was twenty years ago today” My Life with Traumatic Brain Injury

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Ride leader. BCA Wednesday Ride

On August 5, 2000 I set off to ride the Greylock Century Ride, a grueling 100 mile ride through the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. I had already gone up and over Mt. Greylock, the highest point in the state, and up the famous “Hairpin Turn” on Route 2, “The Mohawk Trail.”

At mile 33 I found myself off the road in a drainage ditch  (I found out later they are called “paved waterways” and are designed to keep then snow melt off the road.) The waterway led to a grate. It was too steep to ride back on the road or onto the shoulder so I literally went head over heels onto the pavement, still clipped into my pedals. Continue reading →

“Imagining our New Normal?”

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“Behold I make all things new!” – Revelation 21:5

Twenty years ago my life changed forever in an instant when I flew over the handlebars of my bicycle and landed on my head. Like Humpty Dumpty I “couldn’t be put back together again.” The name for my new situation is traumatic brain injury (TBI), the injury so many of our troops return with from war. Continue reading →