Over the last two weeks, we've had a new guest at Good Shepherd, a man who is in the middle of relocating to the Carolinas from another part of the country. On his first Sunday among us, Ron Dozier was preaching and I was sitting in the congregation.  Our...

This blog title is a bit presumptuous as it suggests I’ve got it all figured out. Well, I don’t. Yet for a variety of reasons, Good Shepherd has long had financial health as a church. In the worst of the 2008-2009 recession, for example, we had our best of years up to...

So Peter's advice to Christians threatened with persecution, execution, and annihilation is so absurd, so preposterous, so over-the-top in lunacy, that it must be true. Nestled in I Peter 4:16, it's this:  "but praise." The authorities are ransacking the church,...

So far in The Path Of Most Resistance, we have challenged ourselves in these ways: Stop fighting FOR victory and start fighting FROM it. Your pain is what God uses the separate the sin he hates from the soul he loves. There's treasure in your trial, so trust. What...

So back in the day, I won one (1) prize money professional tennis tournament. And since the finals of that event was televised on local cable access TV in Trenton, New Jersey, I have had the VHS for these 32 1/2 years. A friend at church recently transferred it to DVD...

On another website deep within the United Methodist blogosphere (we put the dark in "dark web"), I came across the comment below.  Written by a lay member of a United Methodist congregation in another part of the country, it contains an impassioned description of the...

Ah, the 90s. The end of mullets. The beginning of grunge. The end of McEnroe & Connors and the beginning of Sampras & Agassi. The end of VHS & cassette and the beginning of CDs, DVDs, and even the internet itself. So . . . what's the soundtrack from those...

Ron Dozier, our Pastor Of Missions & Community Impact, delivered Week 3 of The Path Of Most Resistance yesterday. Based on James 1:2-5, his message was called Some Really Odd Joy and landed at this bottom line: There is treasure in your trial, so trust. Ron's...

This very nice piece below appeared in the late, great Dallas Times-Herald sometime in the summer of 1981. During that break between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I played a number of tournaments around my native Texas.  A sportswriter looked me up,...

  . . . Jesus Christ. That’s how most of us at Good Shepherd have grown accustomed to completing that sentence. We consciously chose the word "living" rather than "personal" (the more common term in most evangelical circles) because "personal" too easily devolves...