So last Friday, Julie and I had second row seats at John Mellencamp's concert at Ovens Auditorium. We had seen him back in 1999 at Blockbuster, er Verizon, er PNC Music Pavilion in north Charlotte. We thoroughly enjoyed that show and when we stumbled onto these...
I rarely start a message with the bible. In the process of sermon design, I am much more likely to start with people's lives and work from there to the bible. And if it's rare that I start a message with the bible, it is even more unusual for me to start a message...
What does it mean that St. Paul was Jewish? How does the fact the he had memorized large portions of what we call the Old Testament influence the way he writes major sections of the New? In particular, how does that impact the heights he ascends in Romans 8? And what...
Here's what a Good Shepherd friend put up in her office following Sunday's sermon. If God is for us who can be against us? Answer: No one. No thing. No how.
As a lot of you know, James-Michael Smith and I traveled to Odisha State, India from February 22 to March 5. This is the fourth time Good Shepherd has ministered in this area, and each time our emphasis is on training and encouraging local pastors to do the...
Remember albums? Remember when song choice and song order mattered? Remember when artists wanted to tell a story with how they arranged their music and so a record's closing song carried special significance? I do. So here they are: my Top Five Album Closers of them...
To start 4U, a series drawn entirely from Romans 8:31-39, we imagined what it was like for Paul to DICTATE his letter to Tertius, his scribe (see Romans 16:22 for that). This is actually how most of the letters in the New Testament got written . . . I mean, spoken....
Most people who give the subject any thought (and that's not "most people" to begin with) assume that St. Paul wrote his New Testament letters by sitting down and composing them on pen and parchment. But that's not what happened. Instead, we know from the closing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1PDA68tg5M Sometimes it's easy to feel as if the whole world is against you. When you have a run of difficulty in life, it's tempting to believe that forces beyond your control have lined up to rob you of meaning,...
Yesterday, my friends at Wesleyan Accent (www.seedbed.wesleyanaccent.com) published an original piece I wrote for them on a pastoral approach to addiction to pornography. Here it is, slightly amended:...