Peace & public life
Reclaiming Jesus As the Peace Initiative of God
What if the Christian story begins not in conquest, but in the making of peace?
Read the essay →Sermons Never Spoken
Faith beyondthe sanctuary.
Sermons and essays on the inner life, the common good, and the courage to live what we believe.
Find a place to beginWith Rev. Rich Lang
Retired United Methodist minister
Street
Clergy
Clergy
Contemplation. Conscience. Common life.Writing from the Pacific NorthwestRead slowly. Return often.
The reading room
Begin with a question.
Three ways into the writing: peace, economic life, and the meeting of contemplation with action.
Jubilee & the common good
The High Aspirations of the Jubilee
Debt, land, freedom, and the possibility of beginning again. A reading of Jubilee as a public promise.
Read the essay →Contemplation & action
The Mystic and the Activist
What holds the inner life and the work of justice together? Begin at their meeting place.
Read the essay →The witness
A life in the streets.
Public faith beyond the sanctuary walls — from Spokane meal ministries to Occupy Seattle, from Tent City advocacy to district leadership.
Select an image to view it full-size. All photographs from the family archive; captions reflect supplied metadata only.
Crossings
Where the street
meets the page.
Three thresholds from public witness into written reflection. Each arch is a doorway: step through a photograph, find the essay that carries its question.
Dining with Dignity
From a Spokane meal ministry reorganized around the table, not the line — what does welcome look like when the table belongs to everyone?
Browse the archive →Tent City & the church's land
Hosting Tent City 3 in Ballard (2001) and arguing for shelter on religious land as protected practice. The essay that names the stakes.
Read The High Aspirations of the Jubilee →After the pepper spray
November 15, 2011 at 5th & Pine — in alb and stole — and the essay written the next morning. How peace keeps its discipline under pressure.
Read Reclaiming Jesus As the Peace Initiative →Essay links point to the Substack archive. Photo captions in The witness above reflect supplied metadata only.
A seven-part reading series
January 2025The patterns of a spiritual life.
Seven overlapping ways of encountering the sacred. Not a ladder to climb, but patterns we return to, question, and inhabit together.
These are short paraphrases, not quotations. Read each source essay for the full argument, including each pattern's gifts and dangers. Use the navigation buttons, arrow keys, or swipe horizontally to browse.
Prompt for reflectionWhich pattern names where you are today? Which names where you resist?
A field guide to the concepts
What the street taught
the page to say.
Three crossings in one view — each panel holds a photograph from the archive and the question that followed it onto the page. Built from images/, articles-about/, and 90 Real Change columns.
Hospitality
The table, not the line
Spokane Shalom Ministries re-centered the meal from queue to circle. Dignity arrived when the table belonged to everyone. From articles-about — tent-city, RLUIPA, Shalom.
See the witness →Nonviolent discipline
After the pepper spray
November 15, 2011 — stole and alb at 5th & Pine. The essay the next morning asked how peace keeps discipline when the air burns. Pairs with 2011 Talking Stick TV on Christian Fascism.
Cross the threshold →Empire & faith
Christian Fascism, corporate rule
Two 2011 conversations named the merger of market, nation, and sectarian power — and the spiritual alternative that refuses it. Real Change columns 2012–2018 extend the argument.
Watch the conversation →Panels use documentary photographs already in images/; captions are curatorial, not archival metadata.
Inside the archive
A continuing conversation.
A view of the collected writing, not a scorecard of belief.
57
Writing over time
Archived posts per month · zero months included
Read monthly counts as a table
| Month | Posts |
|---|---|
| Dec 2024 | 3 |
| Jan 2025 | 9 |
| Feb 2025 | 7 |
| Mar 2025 | 6 |
| Apr 2025 | 5 |
| May 2025 | 1 |
| Jun 2025 | 4 |
| Jul 2025 | 2 |
| Aug 2025 | 2 |
| Sep 2025 | 3 |
| Oct 2025 | 2 |
| Nov 2025 | 1 |
| Dec 2025 | 0 |
| Jan 2026 | 2 |
| Feb 2026 | 3 |
| Mar 2026 | 3 |
| Apr 2026 | 3 |
| May 2026 | 0 |
| Jun 2026 | 1 |
Cumulative publication
Running total of archived posts by month
Read cumulative counts as a table
| Month | Total posts |
|---|---|
| Dec 2024 | 3 |
| Jan 2025 | 12 |
| Feb 2025 | 19 |
| Mar 2025 | 25 |
| Apr 2025 | 30 |
| May 2025 | 31 |
| Jun 2025 | 35 |
| Jul 2025 | 37 |
| Aug 2025 | 39 |
| Sep 2025 | 42 |
| Oct 2025 | 44 |
| Nov 2025 | 45 |
| Dec 2025 | 45 |
| Jan 2026 | 47 |
| Feb 2026 | 50 |
| Mar 2026 | 53 |
| Apr 2026 | 56 |
| May 2026 | 56 |
| Jun 2026 | 57 |
Words the writing returns to
Occurrences of eight selected words · exact matches
Jesus587
People349
Power253
Church194
MAGA193
Love191
Lawless126
Daniel116
Read word counts as a table
| Word | Occurrences |
|---|---|
| jesus | 587 |
| people | 349 |
| power | 253 |
| church | 194 |
| maga | 193 |
| love | 191 |
| lawless | 126 |
| daniel | 116 |
Reading length distribution
Estimated reading time for all 57 archived posts
1 min0
2 min0
3 min2
4 min0
5 min1
6 min5
7 min1
8 min2
9 min3
10 min6
11 min9
12 min9
13 min7
14 min6
15 min0
16 min3
17 min2
18 min1
Read reading times as a table
| Reading time | Posts |
|---|---|
| 1 min | 0 |
| 2 min | 0 |
| 3 min | 2 |
| 4 min | 0 |
| 5 min | 1 |
| 6 min | 5 |
| 7 min | 1 |
| 8 min | 2 |
| 9 min | 3 |
| 10 min | 6 |
| 11 min | 9 |
| 12 min | 9 |
| 13 min | 7 |
| 14 min | 6 |
| 15 min | 0 |
| 16 min | 3 |
| 17 min | 2 |
| 18 min | 1 |
Source: the 57 locally archived Substack posts, collected September 12, 2026. Months use publication dates in UTC; the first and last months cover only the archive's date range. Word counts use case-insensitive whole-word matches in body text after HTML tags are removed and entities decoded. Titles and metadata are excluded; embedded quotations and subscription text remain. Reprints count as separate posts. These selected words are not a topic ranking or a measure of the author's beliefs. Reading times estimated at 200 words/minute from body_html word count. This is a fixed snapshot, not a live feed.
Real Change archive: 90 columns, Nov 2012–Jan 2018 (peak 24 in 2013). Full text in articles-by-rich/real-change/articles/; bylines and checksums in manifest.json. Research log research/rich-lang-1987-2026.md covers 1987–2026.
Complete reading library
Time to read
Showing 57 of 57 posts
A Liturgical Service in the Age of the Anthropocene
The Heresy of MAGA Christianity
T James Hull: The Resurrected Man
Daniel, Empire, and Holy Week
What Palm Sunday Is Really All About
The New Boss is the Same as the Old Boss
Reading Daniel in a Time of Terror
The Costly Grace of Nonviolent Persistance
The Abomination of Desolation
Living in the End Times
Into The Abyss We Go
I'm Not Dead Yet!
The Bible Tells Me So
What's Next After No Kings?
The Mystic and the Activist
Why Does MAGA Hate America?
The God Who Is With Us From the Inside-Out
The Unity of God, the Sacred and Creation
50 Years in the Lord
A Diatribe and a Psalm of Dissolution
A PRIMER FOR OUR PROTESTS
Against the Deceptive Spirits of ICE
But What About That Old Time Religion?
Daren and the Nihilism of Cruelty
Our Gods Have Failed Us (part one)
The Agenda of the Lawless One
Strange Things
The Theological Meaning of the Indivisible Movement
T. James Hull: The Resurrected Man
Concerning our Current Crucifixion
What Palm Sunday Is All About
MAGA Needs An Exorcism
Why Jesus Pissed People Off
Let's Dance on the Edge of This Volcano
The Immoral Economy of the Lawless One
The Real Religious War
Small Things To Do
The Temptations of Christ Are Also Ours
Jesus and His Shadow
Revival in the Wilderness
Heretical Thoughts
Is It Time to Sharpen our Pitchforks?
The Gnawing Power of God
Turning History Around
The High Aspirations of the Jubilee
The Earthling and Mystical Spirituality
Into the Wild Where We Are Too Afraid To Go
An Interlude Between the Patterns
The MAGA Man of Lawlessness and His Cult
MAGA, DEI, and the Antidote of Pluralist Spirituality
When the fire of faith is soothed by complicity and contentedness
When being a spiritual warrior becomes devilish
When God Loves Us Is Not Enough
What should I look for in looking for a church?
The Togas Are Laughing
Christmas: A Promise of Mutual Indwelling
Reclaiming Jesus As the Peace Initiative of God
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