Notes from the Road: CT Asylum Hill UCC and my incredible colleague Erica Thompson welcomed me to Hartford, CT next. This book event was a highlight for me for several reasons.  First, who doesn’t want to hang out with Erica Thompson? She’s hilarious and brilliant, such an incredible leader, and second, she’s the caretaker of a distinctly beautiful community of faith (I may have taken pictures of all the cool ideas in Asylum Hill’s church building—Hawaiian versions of those ideas will be forthcoming—get ready Community Church of Honolulu!). On Friday night Erica and I had the opportu ..read more

I promised I would take you along with me on this journey, and I haven’t done a good job keeping up with my blogging. I begin now my attempt to rectify that situation and record some memories for posterity…or something. Amy’s friend, Diane Guevara, and friends at The Novel Neighbor book event in St. Louis  After an amazing book launch at Community Church of Honolulu on October 3, I lugged my 3 (!) suitcases to the Honolulu airport and boarded one plane, then another, to land in Saint Louis, MO. While this sounds perhaps like a strange place to begin a book tour, for me it was the perfec ..read more

I’ll be posting more to the blog as I make my way along the road with “Beautiful and Terrible Things” for book tour. Follow along with my schedule here, and on the blog at this link. The wonderful adventures are already piling up, so I wanted to begin chronicling them now. I must begin with the incredible launch party my beautiful church threw on the day the book was officially born: Oct 3, 2023.  Thank you, CCH ‘ohana, for such a beautiful evening.  With everything from parking attendants wearing reflective vests, to twinkle lights, to Kathy Young’s crab dip (!) to Lisa Lai’s caref ..read more

Dear friends, Pastor Amy at book reading hosted by Circular Congregational Church in Charleston, SC It’s a little less than two weeks until October 3, the release date of my book “Beautiful and Terrible Things: Faith, Doubt, and Discovering a Way Back to Each Other.” I’m having a hard time actually believing that this day is almost here. Let me tell you why. Though I have spent most of my professional life writing and speaking in many different forms, "Beautiful and Terrible Things” is my first-ever book. To say its advent has been an ordeal would be something of an understatement; it took a ..read more

Dear friends, As many of you know, I have had the true honor of serving National City Christian Church as intentional interim Senior Minister since June of 2020. I do not have sufficient words to convey the gratitude I feel for National City; I will be forever grateful. In addition to serving National City, much of my time these past few years has been spent building Invested Faith. Invested Faith is a fund set up to receive the assets of churches, many at the end of their institutional life cycles, and to redistribute those assets to support the work of faith-rooted social entrepreneurs who ..read more

In 2017 I was a pastor in New York, and one Sunday I preached a sermon called “The Hardest Commandment.”  That week I was at the very end of preaching a series of sermons on Jesus’ teachings from the gospel of Matthew, commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount.  As I prepared for that sermon, I just happened to read an article in the New York Times Magazine about a group called Narrative 4, committed to bringing people from different perspectives together to share their stories. “Love your enemies,” Jesus taught us.  So how does the owner of the largest online gun trading platf ..read more

Amy Butler SHARE THIS! (RNS) — Three questions hang over the last scenes of "Hamilton," the musical: "Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?" The answers, for us in the COVID-19 crisis, have come to depend on the political persuasion of the state we live in. That’s a true shame for many reasons. Playing politics with people’s lives is a good way to avoid asking some hard questions about who we are as a country.  But what about who we are as a church? Church folks are surely free to make their own careful decisions based on what we believe about who we are as gospel community, right ..read more

Nicholas Little / for NBC News Every attempt at digital engagement for spiritual nurture, bungled or not, is a beautiful expression of a spiritual truth. Last week someone tweeted: “How to faithfully celebrate Easter this year: Only women on the Zoom call. Call is scheduled before dawn. We speak only of impossible things that would topple the empire.” The tweet was referencing the biblical accounts of women, followers of Jesus, returning to Jesus’ tomb alone on Easter Sunday only to discover his body gone. According to the story, it was the women who went out early in the morn ..read more

I can’t help putting this up again. It’s one of my best memories. This year he’s graduating from college…. Every year on Good Friday I repost this memory, originally published almost ten years ago.  The child referenced is about to graduate from high school, and life has changed just a little.  But this remains one of my favorite memories of mothering and pastoring and Holy Week.  Blessed Pretty Good Friday. Holy Week is rather intense around our house, primarily because Mom is working a lot and we all spend quite a bit of time at church. Since this also happens to be Spring Bre ..read more

A friend mused today that walking around Manhattan feels like being on the set of the movie I Am Legend, except that he was a little chagrined not to be *quite* as buff as Will Smith.  I mean, who doesn’t want to be as fit as Will in his 2007 movie that tells the story of a plague decimating humanity? But that longing aside, it’s disconcerting to walk the streets of the busiest city in the world and hear only…silence.  Rattling subway cars and abandoned restaurants, empty playgrounds, and the best parts of New York living: neighbors out on the front stoop, chatting with strangers at ..read more