John P. Burgess

Burgess opens with a year he spent at an East Berlin seminary in the 1980s, when Marxism-Leninism claimed total interpretive authority. Forty years later, he hears the Barmen Declaration's refusal…

At the close of his seventh decade, Burgess takes stock alongside the Bonhoeffer of the prison letters, asking the same question Bonhoeffer asked: who am I? The address is a…

Burgess responds to the 225th General Assembly's call for a new PCUSA confession of faith with a different proposal: confess our present inability to make a common confession, and clarify…

Part two of Burgess's keynote on John 14:6 picks up the human longing for life that is more than survival. He locates the answer not in the desperate self-renewal our…

Burgess opens with a memory of his grandfather, a lifelong Presbyterian missionary in Guatemala, scooping him up off a Denver bus when he was four. The keynote builds from that…

Burgess works through baptism in the form of a parish dialogue: Martha worries the congregation doesn't follow up, Jerry's too busy, Lisa's not sure baptism matters, Max thinks it's mostly…