Ruminations

I am at a unique place in my life.
“Passion” has become the vocabulary word that I find best describes what is happening in me. Caring for children living in extreme passion and planting churches in Brazil, planting a church in Leland that will intentionally take a different path to showing and sharing the power of [...]

Wow!
How can I describe what took place at The Message tonight; Wow! Oops! Already used that didn’t I?
Wow!
I am so proud of our team. They did an incredible job: first live music, powerful intercession, greeting, traffic flow, ambiance (yes, I said “ambiance” — they actually controlled it very effectively!), kids, audio-visual… I was so impressed!
John [...]

I had a long, pleasant, stimulating conversation with a local pastor yesterday.
I had to chastize myself once again about making prejudgments concerning folks before actually meeting them. You’d think that biblical suggestions aside, five+ decades of life would have prepared me to not do that.
Seems my brain matter can be a bit more dense than [...]

Um, this may appear to be rated R-17, but it isn’t. It appeared on the television news, so it is censured.
It may make you want to lose your lunch, however…

Isn’t it funny how you can forget things?
I’d forgotten what it was like on Monday after preaching on Sunday. I think I need to take my vocal cords to the gym and put them on a workout routine. What is so odd is that I must do something different when I speak/preach publicly as opposed [...]

Beautiful, mildly crisp, sunny Saturday morning. Great day to get elbow deep in trash.
The Message Church turned out impressively to hit the streets of Leland (well, at least Lincoln Road) to do litter patrol this Saturday morning. What better way to say we want to make a difference than to pick up after folks?! We [...]

Think you have to sacrifice when you go to church?
I just received this from pastor Audrey in Ubaúna, Brazil:
We had to stop holding worship services in the church building and we moved to the [Seed of Hope] project. Yesterday [last Sunday] we had almost 150 people and 3 conversions. It was really good. The heat [...]

Benaiah. Lion. Pit. Snowy day.
Thanks to Mark Batterson, many know the story.
It wasn’t an accident; he didn’t fall into the pit that held a lion. It wasn’t an attack; the lion hadn’t come after him. The circumstances surrounding the event were simply that, circumstances; the snow, the pit… they were merely the settings, not the [...]

Just read this. And it got me to thinking.
Nairobi, Kenya (CNN) — Kenyan wildlife officials are ferrying thousands of zebras and wildebeest to a park in the country’s south to feed starving lions and hyenas, and prevent a conflict with humans.
The lions are hungry and have no food. Zebras are being rounded up to [...]

It is distressing to see how secular that we as the church have become.
I’m not referencing all the things folks typically reference with calling the church a secular organization. I’m specifically talking about our view of our position in regards to the Enemy, Satan.
In 1973, in my second year of undergraduate studies, I read Whatever [...]