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...
How's that for a technical blog post? But aside from posts about playing tennis or delivering sermons, this is probably the activity on which I have spent the most time. Because we take our guests seriously at Good Shepherd, and we do what we can to ensure they come....
Oh, what a dilemma. Does God allow pain in our lives or does he cause it? Wesleyan Methodists are traditionally much more comfortable with the former while Calvinists often embrace the latter. But what does the author of Hebrews say? Among other things, that's a topic...
Here we are in the fall of 1998 in the living room of the parsonage at Mt. Carmel Church in Monroe, NC. Riley was then six and Taylor was nine. Julie and I were . . . 19 years younger than we are now!
This post is not likely to make me many friends in United Methodism. But here goes: the current mantra in UMC circles of "clergy self-care" has moved from concern to caricature to idol. Over the last couple of years in my Annual Conference, we have heard lectures,...