Back to Normal Life

By -
Okay, I survived the last week of doing normal work AND the groundwork for my doctoral thesis. Hopefully, I can just slide back into the swing of normalcy now. I will still have more work to do, but the hardest part is behind me for now.

Is anyone still there? My apologies for the long absence.

Julie and the boys seem to have survived church camp. It was a week full of blessings. I only went up one evening to do the camp devo for all 160 or so people. It just so happened that my evening there was when ten of the kids had decided to get baptized. Parents & guardians had been called in advance, so there were plenty of extra faces there for the great events of the evening. Yosemite Bible Camp is turning into a major boost for our young people and families. This is undoubtedly a key building block for our church.

Blessings!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Love It or List It: We Sold Our Church Building

By -
Image
On October 8, 2023, we held our last worship service in our home of 59 years. We're moving on to a temporary location while we wait for God to reveal where our more permanent home will be. It's been a journey for which there is no solid road map, but we feel blessed by what's happening. We formed a giant circle for the final song at our longtime, northeast Fresno home. In late January, our elders announced a shock decision. We would be selling our church building and moving on. Among the elders, it was an uncontentious and unambiguous decision. They 100% believed it was in the church's best interest to put our property on the market and find a new home. Many congregations have hard choices to make about aging properties that are oversized for today's churches. Selling seemed the most desirable option to our board in our circumstances. I wrote about that decision back in January. You can read about it here . I had an inside seat to their decision-making process. As a
Read more

Galatians 4:1-7 & The Confusing Apostle Paul

By -
Image
Does Galatians 4:1-7 confuse anyone as much as it does me? After studying this for some time, I am prone to agree with the words of 2 Peter 3:16. "There are some things in [Paul's letters] hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures." I hope I'm not one of the ignorant and unstable people. But I'm in the camp of folks who can say that Paul's writings are occasionally hard to understand. Let me clarify what I'm having a hard time clarifying. I don't really think it's difficult to understand Paul's point in Gal 4:1-7. The broader context makes it clear. Paul says that the Law of Moses is inferior to the promise previously made to Abraham. Gentile Christians, he writes, are descendants of Abraham because they share the same faith in God (3:6-7) that Abraham had (Gen 15:6). They therefore don't need to obey Jewish rules and customs. That's his point. from Anthony
Read more

Still Freezing in Abilene

By -
Image
So I've been in a class all week titled "Missional Ecclesiology." It's taken me most of the week just to figure out what the title even means, but it's been a thoroughly invigorating week. Basically, the class is about how church can become a people who are more fully dedicated to the Kingdom of God. Of course this brings up all kinds of questions. If we are going to reshape our churches to more accurately resemble a pursuit of God designs for creation and humanity, what exactly is his aim? Is he merely interested in us going to heaven? Is that what salvation means? And how do we live our communal life in a way that nurtures this vision of salvation? These are deep questions and not so easily dismissed. For example, when I grew up in church, the primary concern was to be saved from sin and not go to hell. So how did we answer this concern? By baptizing people in the right way for the right reason so that they could have assurance of going to heaven. But as we look
Read more