From pantry darkness to marvelous light
♪ Either my pantry is shrinking or my kids are growing. I’m not referring to their caloric intake (though that does involve a pantry shrinkage of a different sort). I’m talking about the tiny pantry space itself, which multi-tasks as our official glow-in-the-dark testing station.
Shared accountability in missions
♪ To whom is the church accountable in terms of evangelism, outreach, social justice, discipleship, and leadership development? Clearly, it is primarily accountable to God in obedience to the instructions of Scripture. Do conference boards and leadership have a right to speak into this area of the life of the church?
Believe in the Trinity and you shall be saved
♪ Do I have to believe in the Trinity to be saved, really? Listen to the thunder of the Athanasian Creed from the early church: “Whoever desires to be saved should above all hold to the catholic [historic Christian] faith. Anyone who does not keep it whole and unbroken will doubtless perish eternally.
What are we inspiring
♪ The conversation surrounding passing on our Christian faith to the next generations can become quite heated these days. On the one hand, some feel that parents, family members and especially church leaders should sit back and let the next generation choose their beliefs without any interference or coercion. On another side, there are Christian parents who expect their children to accept their beliefs without dialogue, questions or opportunity to explore their faith.
We need grandparents in children’s ministry
When I served in the children’s ministry in my home church as a young adult, one of our faithful volunteers was Grandpa Ed. Grandpa Ed showed up nearly every week and was what we called a “listener”—he wasn’t in a classroom or teaching a Bible lesson, but as kids worked through their memory verses in their classroom, he was available in another area to work one-on-one with kids to memorize or recite their verse. And they loved him.
Pastors pastor women
I state the obvious: As a male pastor, I should be a pastor to women. It should not be said of my ministry that the men got good teaching, mentoring, and compassionate attention, but not so much the women. Female pastors may have these challenges too, but here I am focusing on men.
Tenacious faith in grief and sorrow
The bathroom floor seemed an appropriate place for a meltdown. My sympathetic friend waited for me to gather my thoughts. Though separated by a province, we were connected by phone and heart.
Celebrating a lifetime of ministry
Tim and Laurel Schroder’s first trip to Pukapuki, Papua New Guinea (PNG), included an eight-hour boat trip up the river during which they nearly collided with another dugout, wrecking their propeller and almost swamping their boat with all their belongings.
My little thief
♪ Do you remember the good old days? When we could walk to the corner store, pick up milk, chocolate bars, maybe a new bike? You can’t get away with that anymore. They have surveillance cameras now. Well, theft is no laughing matter.
Half-finished projects
♪ I was thinking about Adam and Eve while I pushed my wheelbarrow full of dirt and weeds to my discard pile. What was tending the garden like for them?
Missions committees: thinking outside the box
♪ According to the information we have from our churches across Canada, approximately half our congregations have a missions committee of some sort—though how they function varies.
Can God fit in you?
♪ A prayer from the African pastor Augustine in the 4th century has stirred my thought for some time: God, “you were closer to me than I am to myself.” If you place that prayer alongside Paul’s prayer that the Ephesians be “filled [with] … all the fulness of God” (Ephesians 3:19), you quickly find yourself in a bottomless sea of wonder and prayer.
Why we need young men in children’s ministry
♪ ALEX IS THE boy nobody wants in their class. He’s in grade two and has seemingly limitless energy and zero attention span. His comments and questions are never on topic, and everybody is convinced that he is learning nothing. He’s usually facing away from the teacher, making faces or jokes as they try to teach, and the end of the year is a relief because he is finally somebody else’s problem.
The church has no “leadership” crisis
♪ WHEN I ENTERED the academic world recently, I noticed changes in Christian education I had not been aware of. I had not realized education had become so focused on leadership development. Across Canada’s Christian colleges there are now academic degrees in leadership, reams of Christian books written on leadership, and faculty whose sole role is to teach leadership development.
The path to joy leads us through adversity
♪ AT THE BEGINNING of this year, I read that DaySpring, the greeting card company, had a Word of the Year Quiz on their website. By selecting a few personal descriptors and Bible verses that resonated with me, I could find a pre-baked, pithy word to construct my life around for the next 365 days (366 with the leap year).
Midwinter Meditations on Scripture’s Sweet Promises
Winter’s first semester was warm, erring on the side of balmy. Albertans tentatively accepted the lingering fall weather, painfully aware they’d been fooled before by the sudden arrival of a tsunamic dump of snow or a frigid pop quiz.
The Time Traveller’s Question
Imagine an EMC time-traveller from the 1920s visiting us today. Would they find any clue that, of all the churches in town, this was their descendant?
Hidden In Their Hearts
One of the many gifts children give us adults is the freedom to be childlike again. There is nothing more freeing than running in a gym playing pool noodle tag. (The fact that I couldn’t keep up is neither here nor there.)
The rules of the game
“16 million,” my son places his rent card on the discard pile. Grandpa’s brow furrows. “How did you get that?” My son points to his colorful wild cards.
The ancient global treasure of EMC faith
We’re sitting on a gold mine. The world is gasping for it, and we have it, though we don’t always grasp its biblical beauty.