Our church’s Bell Tower is now surrounded by scaffolding, as workmen have begun the repair / renewal project, which will continue for about a month. This is the part of our church structure that seems to symbolize who we are in the community. We have known for some time that the cross at the top […]
When I was six or seven and learning to read, one of the books that fascinated me most was an edition of Aesop’s Fables. I can still see some of the drawings that illustrated each of the fables, and I was well aware that every story ended with a brief, memorable “moral” that summarized the […]
Last week, somebody posted a meme about how the word STRESSED written backward spells DESSERTS. Ever since then, I’ve been treating my worrisome nature with bowls and bowls of ice cream. It worked. But now I can’t buckle my belt, which has given me something new to worry about. My DESSERTS have flipped me back […]
Communication is two-way. That’s what the “co” at the beginning means. Its definition is the sharing of information between two or more people, not the one-directional imparting of information. Unfortunately, we live in a society in which a lot of time and energy is spent on trying to get a message across. We’re bombarded with […]
What does a guy in prison think about? I imagine he’d spend hours feeling sorry for himself, going over how unfair life was and what things were being denied to him. The Apostle Paul lived at least two years under house arrest, in the constant custody of a Roman military guard (Acts 28:16, 30), and […]
The average female octopus may live six months to a year. After a male fertilizes her, she lays one large batch of eggs — maybe 200,000 or more — then she dies. That’s sad, but it’s also amazing that she reproduces so many new individuals, each one a tiny miracle of living potential, with a […]
In the society in which our Bible emerged, extended families took care of their own. If a person was sick or disabled, if a young woman could not find a marriage partner, if children were left, for some reason, with no parents to protect and provide for them, the extended family was there to help. […]
Did you know that sympathy is a Christian virtue, but empathy is a sin? That’s the word, according to two leaders in the Gospel Coalition, a self-appointed group of prominent figures in the evangelical world.* In this video (here) Dr. Doug Wilson and Dr. Joe Rigney together construct a false dichotomy between sympathy (literally “suffering with”) […]
I recently stumbled upon a blog post that celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first Bat Mitzvah in America, on March 18, 1922.1 That may not mean much to most of you, but it really interested me because of my long history of interaction with Jewish communities throughout my ministry years. We’re more familiar with the […]
We’ve been trying to envision the Church’s future. One of the things that’s clear is that we’re not effectively communicating our faith to our young people. They don’t seem to hear the Gospel good news as we’re trying to express it to them. Very few of them seem turned on by the belief system that […]