Follow Jesus. Lead the church. Change the world.
If you’ve followed our journey, you probably know that we are Provisional Elders in The United Methodist Church working toward ordination. As part of the process, we attended a retreat Sunday evening through Monday afternoon. On Monday, Revs. Greg Myers (Wilkes-Barre District Superintendent) and Mark Webb (York District Superintendent) each led us in a discussion … Read more
I am still making my way through Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book. Earlier, I wrote about the first three chapters, and in this post, I’ll reflect on the last couple chapters of part one. In chapter four, Peterson talks about story and suggests, “Story is the primary verbal means of bringing God’s Word to us” … Read more
Last week, Bishop Robert Schnase (Bishop in Residence of the Missouri Area of The United Methodist Church) came to teach on the Five Practices in our conference. Since we’re working our way through the Five Practices at Centre Grove, the event was partly review for me, but it was also good to hear Bishop Schnase … Read more
In her book, The Organic God, Margaret Feinberg talks about the abundant kindness of God. She writes … I must not just accept that God is kind, I must embrace his kindness as my own. Feinberg says that kindness is largely learned: God displays his kindness through people who give us mini lessons of kindness. … Read more
I participated in this morning’s See You at the Pole event at Clearfield High School. This is what I shared. Engage: Go and Pray “Go and pray to God for me and for the people …” (2 Kings 22.13a, The Message) Israel and Judah had a history of waning back and forth in their commitment … Read more
In Guidelines for Leading Your Congregation: Stewardship, Phyllis M. Bowers has outlined twelve qualities of the Christian steward. Rev. Bowers is the Executive Director of The United Methodist Stewardship Foundation of Central Pennsylvania. It is an honor for her work to be published in a denominational guide. Over the next year, we will take a … Read more
(This post was updated on April 6, 2016.) For the first few years of this blog, we posted very few photos. That changed when we adopted children, and wanted to share photos of them here and on social media. Photos need to be reduced and optimized for the Web for faster page loading. Over the … Read more
Sometimes, when Ethan does something I remember him doing before (especially something we photographed), I think about how much Ethan has grown. Here’s one practical example. The earlier photo was taken August 21, 2008 and the latest one was taken yesterday, September 18, 2009. The two photos show how much Ethan has grown in the … Read more
We didn’t post a lot of photos over the summer, but now that it’s behind us, we’ll post some images from Summer 2009. In late June, we spent a few days in Pittsburgh where we visited the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. We also went to the Pittsburgh Zoo on two different days. On the Just … Read more
Now that I’ve had a chance to sleep on it, I’ll share a few more thoughts on yesterday’s free online leadership, The Nines. One thing that quickly became clear is that everyone has different passions, callings, and things they’re focused on. Some of those passions and focuses meshed well with my own passions while others … Read more