Growing the Faith of the People
For Wednesday Night Family Supper we enjoyed a fun and energetic presentation of “Chopped” with Jim Rumph and Sally Watkins as our top chefs! With the objective of creating a dessert, our chefs had a limited time to bring their culinary delights to the judges. In the end, Sally’s dessert was chosen and Jim was chopped! However, everyone enjoyed the antics during the cooking process–especially the children!
October 14, 2024
A few weeks ago, this hymn was sung in worship. In 28 years of ministry, I can’t recall ever singing this hymn, which is unfortunate because the words are beautiful. You might be familiar with this hymn but if not, I offer it to you for reflection.
O God of Every Nation
O God of every nation, of every race and land, redeem your whole creation with your almighty hand; where hate and fear divide us, and bitter threats are hurled, in love and mercy guide us, and heal our strife-torn world.
From search for wealth and power and scorn of truth and right, from trust in bombs that shower destruction through the night, from pride of race and station and blindness to your way, deliver every nation, eternal God, we pray.
Lord, strengthen all who labor that all may find release from fear of rattling saber, from dread of war’s increase; when hope and courage falter, Lord, let your voice be heard; with faith that none can alter, your servants undergird.
Keep bright in us the vision of days when war shall cease, when hatred and division give way to love and peace, till dawns the morning glorious when truth and justice reign, and Christ shall rule victorious o’er all the world’s domain.
In the past few days, I’ve used these words as a prayer. I invite you to do the same.
This Week’s Readings:
We are reading the Bible in just a little over a year! We are now reading Leviticus. You may join anytime. Just mark your Bible on the chapter you started and keep up with the weekly readings.
Things to Pray About:
“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank him for all he has done.” – Philippians 4:6
October 7, 2024
Richard Rohr has written many books on spirituality and maturity. He wrote one that I deeply appreciate and frustrates me to no end, Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation. Drawing upon the Bible, Christian tradition, and other cultures, Rohr argues that men in Western society often lack meaningful rites of passage to help them mature. Without significant rites of passage, one is confused, disconnected, and stuck.
For Rohr, he believes that each male must own five key promises or insights to grow and mature (I agree but also think it would apply to women as well). Here are the five key promises that each of us must learn:
We need these insights for our wellbeing. Each of these precepts are part of the Christian journey. If you have never considered these, I invite you to do so. Don’t read them only to discard later today—dig deep with these, contemplate these over the next few months while listening to the voice of God beckoning you to go deeper.
This Week’s Readings:
We are reading the Bible in just a little over a year! We are now reading Leviticus. You may join anytime. Just mark your Bible on the chapter you started and keep up with the weekly readings.
Things to Pray About:
“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank him for all he has done.” – Philippians 4:6
September 30, 2024
Why is it that we are really proficient in compartmentalization? For Christians, there is the uncanny ability to separate the secular from the sacred. Peter Scazzero, a pastor in New York, summed up this problem by quoting a question asked by a church member, “Why is it that so many Christians make such lousy human beings? In a word, compartmentalization. We divide our lives into categories: Over here belongs to God…over there belongs to me.
For some, there is weekly attendance in worship on Sundays but no evidence of it from Monday to Saturday. For another, the berating of a family member for their lack of spiritual maturity, all under the banner of defending God. Finally, one can be lost in the joy of worship of God only to complain, gossip, and blame others.
How shocking it is to read that there is no noticeable difference between the way evangelical church goers live, and non-church goers live when compared to divorce rates, giving patterns, sexual promiscuity and cohabitation, and racism (See Ron Sider’s The Scandal of Evangelical Conscience for statical data).
Spiritual maturity is more than what one believes. It equally involves how one lives. Orthodoxy and orthopraxis must align. When there are disconnects, where one compartmentalizes the spiritual and the secular, there will always be problems. A life with God is one of unity (body, mind, and soul)—all of it is spiritual and sacred. Everything that we are and everything that we do is connected to God. The work of God’s Spirit is to bring wholeness. Therefore, we can segment our lives so that what we do on Sundays and what we do the rest of the week aligns—everyday is Sunday for that matter.
This Week’s Readings:
We are reading the Bible in just a little over a year! We are now reading Leviticus. You may join anytime. Just mark your Bible on the chapter you started and keep up with the weekly readings.
Things to Pray About:
“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank him for all he has done.” – Philippians 4:6
As we continue to look at the connection between spiritual maturity and emotional wellbeing, one of the ways we bifurcate the two is by ignoring our feelings. For most Christians, there can be a resistance by ignoring anger, sadness, and fear. Some would even go so far as to say those feelings are sinful. Afterall, aren’t Christians supposed to be filled with joy, love, and peace?
We ignore our anger because we assume that we are not loving. We ignore our sadness because we think to be sad is a lack of faith in God. We ignore our fear because we believe fear and faith are juxtaposed. Therefore, when we experience these emotions, we quickly deny them which creates a disconnect in our lives. Our emotional wellbeing suffers.
One of my favorite passages is 1 Samuel 30. David’s camp was ransacked by the Amalekites. David’s family and all of David’s follower’s families were kidnapped as spoils of war. Everyone was angry, sad, and fearful. David was “greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him, because all the people were bitter in soul…” (Verse 6). Before David did anything, he owned his grief, acknowledged his feelings, expressed his emotions, and strengthened himself in the Lord his God. He didn’t deny his humanity.
When we deny our humanity, we push against what it means to be ourselves. Human beings have emotions. Jesus had emotions. To repress our feelings is to rob ourselves of what it means to be created in God’s image. Not only does it create a massive disconnect, but “it also deadens our humanity, instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities, under the influence of grace” (Thomas Merton).
Feelings and emotions are gifts from God. They are natural expressions of human action and interaction. People are not robots—so don’t try to be. The spiritual mature and the emotional healthy own their emotions. They use them in adequate ways to give expressions of their life experiences. If you are struggling today with owning your emotions, I invite you to spend time in the Psalms. Each chapter is filled with emotional discourse of what it is like to be a human following God. 
This Week’s Readings:
We are reading the Bible in just a little over a year! We are now reading Leviticus. You may join anytime. Just mark your Bible on the chapter you started and keep up with the weekly readings.
Things to Pray About:
“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank him for all he has done.” – Philippians 4:6