Richard A. Ray

Parish ministry is one of the most demanding journeys a person can take. Ray writes to encourage those discerning the call, and the older ministers who tend them, with a…

Ray opens with a Boy Scout sea voyage to Austria as a fifteen-year-old, the moment a curious kid first met big questions. The address builds from that memory toward an…

Ray opens with himself as a fifteen-year-old on a weather-beaten ship bound for Austria, the journey on which he first noticed how much words could carry. The piece works toward…

Church-leadership conferences offer endless cures for stagnant congregations: webinars, restructuring, mergers, branding consultants. Ray draws on John Leith and a long memory to question whether any of these have actually…

Late medieval worship was overrun with what Calvin called theatrical trifles. Ray follows Calvin's polemic into its sources and stakes, and asks what 'theatrical' looks like in modern Reformed worship…

Ray picks up Julian of Norwich's Showings, reads it again, and finds soteriology buried in the oddities of her sentences. The piece is about what happens when a theological text…