Baptized Into Christ

This was my newsletter article for April. The Perfect Church Member After church this past Sunday, someone jokingly asked if I’d be preaching a sermon on the perfect church member.  Well…I won’t be preaching on that topic, but since you asked… ·          The perfect church member is young, married, with young children, and has 90 years of experience in living as a Christian. ·          The perfect church member is an enthusiastic new Christian who has been a lifelong Christian with deeply rooted faith. ·          The perfect church member is single and dedicates all free time to serving the church, while simultaneously establishing a wide net of friendships inside and outside of the church. ·          The perfect church member is extremely wealthy and can give generously to the church, but doesn’t work and s...

Below is what I wrote for our March 2015 newsletter. “Love Must Be Tough” is the title of a book by Dr. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family.  In his book, Dobson writes concerning marriage and the difficulties of marriage. Isn’t it interesting that it is tough to love the person you chose to be with and to whom you chose to commit yourself?  It isn’t as if you were randomly assigned a spouse.  You chose your spouse!   Yet, love must be tough, because even in this relationship in which we voluntarily choose to commit to loving another person, we struggle to love them. That “love must be tough” is shown in our families as well.  As parents age and their children have to make decisions regarding their care, it is tough for both parents and children.  Yet, children care for parents in spite of how tough it is. If love is tough in a marriage and if love is tough if a family, how much tougher will it be for us in the church? ...

Every pastor has experienced it.  Preparing a sermon, preparing to enter the pulpit to preach God's Word to God's people, but his thinking is clouded by hurtful words that still echo in his head. A member...a loved and trusted member of the church...said something deeply hurtful to the pastor.  Maybe the comment was about him personally.  Maybe it was about something the he does or doesn't do.  Perhaps, worst of all, it was said about his wife or family. Such comments are deeply hurtful.  I could give you personal examples, but I won't out of love and respect for the individuals involved and because it would be poor pastoral practice to do so. How can a pastor deliver God's Word in a faithful way in such a situation?  The temptation is to use the pulpit to vent about the situation or to "address" the thinking that led to such comments.  Or not to preach at all, because who wants to talk to people who have hurt you so deeply?  The temptation ...

Music is powerful.  You can probably still sing songs you learned as a child.  You could hear a couple of words to the lyrics of a song that was big 25 years ago, that you haven't heard more than a couple of times since then, and you could still rattle off the lyrics. Music is powerful.  There's an old maxim that is tossed around by theologians "lex orandi, lex credendi" (which means something like "the law of praying/worship is the law of believing."  In other words, the word and way in which you worship is both determined by and simultaneously determines what you believe. So the words of a song, used in worship, will both be determined by what is believed, but will also shape what is believed. Music is powerful.  Perhaps that is why Christian music artists are given such powerful voices in the Christian community today (that and the fact that the celebrity driven culture has infected even the church). There's no way to cover everything concerni...