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...
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...
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....
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:...
Maybe it was the climactic scene from Sunday's Lose To Gain short film. Or maybe it was the lovely story I heard at Tuesday night's All You Sons And Daughters concert. Or maybe it was the realization of how many male staffers at Good Shepherd are dads with daughters....
I have a confession: earlier in my ministerial career I treated any conversation about church mission statements with the dreaded eye roll. "Not again," I thought. "There goes someone pontificating about mission and vision, which if you ask me is just a lot of talk...
If you've been to Good Shepherd for more than five minutes, you know that we are all about "inviting all people into a living relationship with Jesus Christ." We say it, we repeat it, we preach it, we publish it, and one of these days we may even sing it. What you...
When you grow up in a Roman Catholic family in New York City, becoming a pastor's wife is simply not on your radar. Yet that's what happened to my wife, Julie. To say she is not a "typical" pastor's wife would be an understatement. She doesn't play the pipe organ,...