Follow Jesus. Lead the church. Change the world.
Each year, the Juniata Valley Ministerium conducts weekly Community Lenten services from Ash Wednesday to Maundy Thursday. Each week, we gather in a different church so that most pastors get to host one service and speak in one service (outside their own church). Tonight, I spoke at the Water Street Evangelical Church. This year we … Read more
Yesterday I received my copy of the March/April 2007 issue of Interpreter Magazine (a publication of the United Methodist Church) in the mail. The cover story caught my attention: "Changing Communities, Changing Churches." There are some great stories about United Methodist churches that, faced with the challenge of changing communities, chose to make the changes … Read more
The next big step in our adoption process is the home visit by a social worker from our adoption agency. We recently scheduled this visit for Monday, 19 March 2007! This visit will cover many details about the rest of the process and will get us started on completing the ton of paperwork that is … Read more
I have been waiting for a while to see the movie, Amazing Grace, which opened in theaters last Friday (2/23). We decided to watch it today on our day off. It was worth the wait! The movie, which tells the story of William Wilberforce’s campaign to end slavery in England, was very well done. Wilberforce, … Read more
Earlier tonight, Joleen and I attended the “How Great is Our God” tour concert at the Bryce Jordan Center on the Penn State campus in State College, PA. Chris Tomlin and Matt Redman (worship leaders) and guest speaker, Louie Giglio, offered an amazing 3-hour worship experience! I enjoy Tomlin and Redman’s worship music, and Louie … Read more
The first leg of the journey completed! Last evening, we along with five other families, completed the four group sessions. They consisted of one all-day session and three evening sessions. Some of the topics we covered were the adoption process, positive adoption language, medical information, bonding and attachment, discipline, loss and grieving, and the search … Read more
Recently, Rev. Dr. Tom Salsgiver, wrote an editorial for our conference publication called, “Keepers of the Aquarium or Fishers of People.” The article got my leadership juices flowing and I started thinking specifically about pastoral leadership in a “fishers of people” context. Pastoral Leadership In a “Fishers of People” ContextBy Randy Willis Tom Salsgiver recently … Read more
Today, we concluded our series on “Navigating Life: Doing Life God’s Way!” We believe it was an important series; we certainly hope that it was helpful for the hrist followers in our congregations! We don’t always collaborate on our sermon series, but this series grew out of a conversation we had while traveling to Tennessee … Read more
We will occasionally post reports on the progress of our dissertation work. For this first report, we wish we had more progress to report than we do. It has been 5 weeks since our class, and while we always need a break after class, we had hoped to be a little further along than we … Read more
Whew! What a week. The "dissertation-writing and church-based research class" that we took this past week on campus was pretty overwhelming. It was a very helpful week, though, but it is simply the beginning of a long journey that will, God willing, culminate with graduation in May 2008! I wrote earlier this week on Wednesday … Read more