Thanksgiving.  It’s what we do.  We travel, we gather, we pray, we eat, we watch football, we sleep, and then we prepare for Christmas.  It’s the same year after year. But ThanksLiving?  It’s not what we do.  It’s who we are.  Or, in the case of Good Shepherd Church,...

Think of all the things that get our double takes: Beautiful people. Sunsets on the beach. Sunrise on the beach. Mist rising from the mountains. The colors in a kaleidoscope. A city skyline at night. Beautiful people. And James throws in this line early in his...

Matthew Bates' Salvation By Allegiance Alone has been a mind-bending, soul-shaping, and preacher-salivating read for me over the last few weeks. Here's the thesis in a nutshell: It's a Gospel that starts with Jesus instead of me and culminates more with a Savior who...

One of my earliest memories — say from when I was four or five years old — is the awareness that I have a very unusual first name. And early on, I didn’t like it. First, it was easy to make all kinds of vaguely insulting nicknames out of it.  TalBUTT was the name of...

I still buy books and CDs.  Books you can touch and CDs you place in a player. My children (28 and 25) consider it almost inconceivable that I buy music in CD format and books in bound format.  To them, music & books are what you download, and I’m wasting time,...

Throughout the years, I have told a number of Good Shepherd staffers that as much as I love planning and preparing sermons as well as leading LifeGroup conversations, there come times when I simply have "to feel like a pastor today." By that I mean the urgency to...

Years ago, I heard a clergy-coaching-type ask a rather provocative question of a group of us: Do you pastor so that you can preach or do you preach so that you can pastor? Meaning:  as one who leads a local church, do you provide a ministry of presence in people's...

I am a Christian first of all. But within that larger confession of faith, I have identified with the particular expression known as Methodism for the last 35 years. Now: the denomination has its flaws.  Its future is far from certain. So I continue to ask: why have I...

Bouncebackers wound up yesterday in a message that was a bit of a departure from the previous four. We landed in the New Testament rather than the Old and we delved into a familiar figure rather than obscure. Bottom line?  Your worst moment is no match for his great...

Here are some thoughts originally posted in 2010 but worthy of a revisit. Ironically, after this post seven years ago, Brad heard about it through some internet friends, and we reconnected.  Teenage rivalries tend to lose their intensity in middle age ... I always...