I've been thinking a lot about The Curse Of Knowledge recently. Just what is The Curse Of Knowledge? This:  once you know something, you forget what it's like not to know it. The applications in church life are almost endless: Once you know the Apostle's Creed, you...

In lieu of a Top Five Tuesday (or Sermon Rewind Monday), I give you Sunday's Sing Spiritually worship gathering from Good Shepherd. Sing Spiritually was the culmination of Wake Up Call and was noteworthy for a number of reasons: Instead of a sermon, we had a guided...

I love it when a series takes me by surprise. And Wake Up Call has done just that. People have resonated with the calls to ministry, the invitations to community, and the urging to awaken to the ongoing power and ministry of the Holy Spirit. And then it concludes...

  During a Next Step group, a woman made the most interesting observation about Good Shepherd:This is not a big church.  It’s a church where a lot of people belong. And I did what I always do in a situation like that:  exclaimed “that will preach!” and then wrote...

Reaching into my bookcase recently, I was startled to pull out these two gems that helped move me to United Methodist ministry.  I honestly thought I had loaned them out to someone who neglected to return them . . . but there they were, right where I had left them in...

On Sunday evening, we celebrated the outdoor baptism of some of our favorite Good Shepherd people. We explained to the families, friends, and supporters that baptism is the entire Easter weekend in an instant:  dying with Christ, buried in death, and then, gloriously,...

I think I've been preparing this sermon for 26 years. Dealing with diversity, the church, the biblical text of Ephesians, and with a few shout outs to Methodism in between, here is Causes & Their Effects. It landed at this bottom line: When it comes to ethnicity...

This Sunday's Wake Up Call sermon and service is vital for understanding not only the Holy Spirit but Good Shepherd Church itself. I have love thinking about and then preparing this message, and I am unusually excited to deliver it. And as if that wasn't enough, we've...

  Here’s one of the questions I recently asked each of our staff to consider:How can my schedule be as full of face-to-face interactions with people as it is full of nose-to-screen interactions with my computer? Answering that question well is one of the great...

For over 17 years now, I have taught the new member class at Good Shepherd.  The group's current name is Next Step, as in "helping you take your next step in your living relationship with Jesus Christ." In all of its iterations, one session out of the four (or five,...