About Me

Hi! My name is Kara.

I'm a recovering perfectionist.

And I have the feeling that I’ve done this whole Christian discipleship thing a bit backwards.

I have been a perfectionist since I was 8 years old. My perfectionism is rooted in the belief that my life is justified by being exceptional. Those statements are so real for me that I cannot expand upon them.

In an effort to be exceptional in many ways, I had a tendency to skip some of the important steps of Christian discipleship. In fact, my whole discipleship journey has been a bit backwards. Don’t tell my pastor, but I graduated from my confirmation class before I was ever baptized. I was confirmed in a United Methodist church when I was 17 years old and was baptized two years later in a (clean) horse trough on Easter at a non-denominational evangelical church. I played music in the worship band before I ever really believed in Jesus. And I was over two years into serving at a United Methodist church as a licensed local pastor before I experienced anything close to theologians would call “justification by faith” in Jesus Christ. Because of my desire to be perfect and exceptional at all times, I tend to skip ahead in my walk with Christ and then circle back to find what I missed.

The title for this project is Incorrectly Christian, which is to say that this is about practicing the love of Jesus Christ without the pressure to do so "correctly." Here, I'm not looking for the way to be Christian, but rather a way for me to be authentically Christian. My hunch is that all of us are looking for something like that, deep down.

Some of you may know me from the Daily Prayers I've led as a member of the Chapel, the experimental online gathering place established by Nadia Bolz-Weber. The Chapel was specifically created for "spiritual misfits," and I certainly felt like one at the time. The Chapel was a sacred space where I felt safe to share my thoughts and questions not only without judgment, but with encouragement. In light of the Chapel coming to an end in April 2022, a few people asked where they could find my work. So I created this website, where I post my writings.

For a while I did not post anything here, and the reason for that is simple: I didn’t feel like I had anything to say here that I couldn’t say in the pulpit. In my first meditations, I was reckoning with the experience of being “invited to leave” by the first church I was appointed to serve in Georgia (even though the official story is that it was mutual). I didn’t need to carve out a separate space where my true self could be shared because I was moved somewhere I was welcomed. I didn’t want to abandon this space (or the newsletter I sent each week to faithful friends and ex-Chapelites!), but I didn’t know when I would be back. This blog began as a place where I could begin to hear myself think. But now it seems to be more of a place where I would like to capture and share my thoughts as they happen in time—and where I am more willing to be seen and known for who I am.

Now I am serving as the pastor of Weston United Methodist Church in Weston, Missouri, a small town north of Kansas City.