Welcome to THUGGED OUT PASTOR.COM!

Thanks for your interest in popular culture, theology, urban ministry, new ways for being a confessing church in our times, and new cultural ways to produce symbols and strength for life. And thanks for your sense of humor. As Pastor and Executive Director of Central City Lutheran Mission, I am often asked what I think, what I believe, my theology or how I maintain my hope and sense of vision. This website makes no claims to be a systematic theological approach to any of those questions! The offerings here come as humble reflections lifting up our pastoral project as both a statement of resistance to domination and as an invitation for those wishing to become engaged in new ways for living and organizing to do so. Why THUGGED OUT PASTOR? I asked myself the same question when the youth chose this as the name for my website. We talk a lot about thugs in our urban context. "Thugs need hugs" is often a phrase used as we reach out to touch those around us as a way to show we care and all are welcome in this place. Thugs have a basic distrust of a system that has created ghettos in america. Like the early Christians, thugs often find themselves in resistance to the current globalization of resources, meaning more money for a few and more poverty for the majority. Thugs of all ages gather to share bread and wine. Thugs of all ages come to celebrate new ways for living and for building a safer world for our children. Rather than judge the thugs, they are welcomed at the Mission into a paradise that prefigures a world yet to be born. As a living website linked to a pastoral project in San Bernardino, CA, the materials loaded here come from the day-to-day work in one of america's poorest urban communities. They will change often. So visit the website often. Drop me a line and let me know your work. Together we can create non-congregationally based, denominationally rooted popular Christian communities that are rooted in the Eucharist and call people on the margins to reclaim the Gospel as their own.