This has been one of my primary dilemmas in church leadership: do you rely on strategy or lean on the Spirit? Here’s what I mean. Back in the day, many churches (including Good Shepherd) adopted a model of church function and leadership that centered on a baseball...
One of the treasures I brought back to Charlotte with me after a weekend in Austin, Texas was this copy of Jack London's The Call Of The Wild. ----------------------------------- My mother used to read this one to me as we sat by the heating vent in my parents'...
While I spent this past weekend with my mother (Betty Davis, age 103) in Austin, Texas, Wayne Hobson brought the message in the third week of the Up In Arms series. Wayne was witty, insightful, compelling, and, in the words of a Good Shepherd friend, "he hit it out of...
Over the last couple of posts, I have distinguished between ancient Greek speech making and modern American letter writing as we looked at the New Testament letter of Paul to the Ephesians. And Ephesians is 100% the former and 0% the latter. The pronouns have told us...
Yesterday, I shared some insights regarding the differences between ancient Greek speech making and modern American letter writing, and as an example took you through the first fourteen verses of Ephesians. Once readers make the proper distinction between the “we” and...
Over the last month, my Men's LifeGroup at Good Shepherd has been reading through a series of Paul's letters, starting with First Corinthians and continuing through Ephesians. Every morning, I have been sending them thoughts on the chapter assigned for the day. I...
Yesterday's message ... Preached the RIGHT message (I hope) at the WRONG time of year; Shifted the focus from Peter's denial to Peter's tantrum; Shifted the focus from Peter to the servant girl who was "on to him." Generated a lot of moments of silence throughout the...
Earlier this week, I was wrestling with a bottom line for an upcoming sermon. The passage in question was tricky. The opportunity to go in multiple directions was both alluring and bewildering. The temptation to "borrow" the insights of another preacher was real. The...
A friend of mine recently told a group of us that he has a minor condition with his nervous system. ---------------------------------------------------- And I asked what I thought was the obvious question: "Why don't we have a calm system?" We have nerve...
Forty years ago yesterday, January 7, 1979, I became a Christian. I had been baptized as an infant in the Episcopal Church, but by the time I was four or five, my mom stopped going herself or taking her kids. So I never went to Sunday School, never attended VBS,...