A few years ago, I had a hard time.
The church that I serve closed for the COVID pandemic in March of 2020 and I went into crisis mode. We closed the church building. We went to online worship services. We endured Zoom bombings, including one that led to conversations with the FBI, and pivoted to pre-recorded services. We added communication channels. We did everything that we could to keep people engaged during a time when we could not gather.
Over the course of the pandemic, we had a few masked, healthily-distanced, outdoor events when the weather warmed up. And, in February 2021, we reopened the building and kept some of the precautions: we wore masks, we kept our distance, we cut responsive speaking and all singing, we stopped passing the peace and the offering plates, and so on. By October 2022, we were back to normal, albeit with lower attendance, lower engagement, and lower giving.
At the time, it felt like we were teetering on the edge of oblivion.
And then, early on a Sunday morning, I got a call from one of the local funeral homes. I had been expecting this death and I was ready for it. But it kicked off a few overloaded weeks: a funeral, a wedding, two burials, five wider church meetings, a leadership retreat, and some interpersonal crises in the congregation. And, of course, all of the not-quite-normal stuff that comes with being the pastor in the not-really-post-pandemic era.
Stacks on stacks of crises. And I realized that I was not okay.
So I took a week to recalibrate and reorient myself. And one of the results was a newsletter that I called honestly: a kind of secret public journal about being a pastor in the not-really-post-pandemic mainline church.
And, in December 2023—after just a little more than a year—I shut honestly down. That was a little bit because I felt that it had run its course, and that was a little bit because there are a surprising number of nazis where the newsletter was hosted: on Substack.
It is now January of 2026, a little more than three years since I started honestly and a little more than two years since I shut it down. And, while some things have gotten easier, a lot of things… haven’t.
Life at the church is not much different than it was when I started honestly: attendance, engagement, and giving are about where they were when I shut honestly down and, in some ways, I’ve come to terms with that. But moving from this is a crisis to this is the new normal is not the same as moving from this is hard to this is easy, and many of the same challenges that made honestly an important project for me are still there.
My personal life has had some twists and turns, including moving my mom into memory care, which was difficult for both of us at first and which has become easier for each of us over the months (though for entirely different reasons). The stress of that move led me to start seeing a therapist, which is good, but I also believe that there are appropriate ways to process things publicly, if only to (1) show that pastors are people, too, and (2) help reduce the stigma around talking about mental health.
And, of course, Donald Trump was elected to a second term as president of the United States. This, somehow, ushered in an era of even greater cruelty and stupidity than his first term, including, it appears, nazis. As I write this, federal agents are wreaking havoc in Minnesota, the president is threatening Europe over control of Greenland, and the United States is slouching toward fascism.
So I started wanting to talk about my experiences as a progressive pastor in a mainline congregation in a red part of the country. I think that’s partly because it’s good for me to talk about things—wether that’s to my therapist or to the gaping silence of the internet—and partly because there might be other people who can learn from both my success and my mistakes.
And that means that honestly is back.
This version of honestly will be a little different than the old one (which is still just sitting there on Substack). I’m still going to talk about church stuff, but also expand beyond that to talk about the general uneasiness of life today. And I’m still going to avoid talking about open wounds here, but also talk about scars that might be a bit rawer than before.
So come and join me on this weird little journey. Hopefully, this time, I can treat it a little more like an actual secret public journal, and it will last for more than a little over a year.