Faith And Love

Bill Neaves and his wife, Priscilla

Churchgoers at a tidy, white-steepled United Methodist Church in Carrollton, Missouri, heard a frank admission from their guest pastor one spring morning in 2007. “When asked to preach this Sunday, I almost said no,” Priscilla Wood Neaves told the congregation. “Why? Not because I lacked training and experience, and I have always enjoyed preaching.” She…

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Hospital Chaplains Deliver Spiritual Care

Comfort in Crisis

Right from birth, this baby was sick, in trouble. “Her mother immediately asked for prayer and was very optimistic,” Kathie Knehans, then a chaplain at Children’s Mercy Hospital  told me. So Knehans prayed with the family. And even when no family members were present, Knehans, now retired, visited the child and prayed. When the still-hospitalized…

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Using An Old Custom To Lure New Parishioners

For the last half century, membership numbers in Mainline U.S. Protestant churches have gone mostly in one direction — down. Protestants once constituted a large majority of the American population. And Mainline churches — the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ, the Christian…

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(Faith)fully Serving Listeners

Zedek talks with Hill before a show

Virtually every Sunday morning for more than two decades, the Rev. Robert Lee Hill has left his Brookside home before sunrise to make his way to the studios of KCMO radio. The live talk show he co-hosts with Rabbi Michael Zedek and Bill Scholl of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas has also become…

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My, How the Garden Grows

monarch on a sunflower

Located among strip malls, office buildings and rows of uniform houses, The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah in Overland Park is in the heart of suburbia. But park your car behind the temple, which sits on Nall Avenue a little south of 119th Street, wander up a winding dirt path, and you will find that you’ve…

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