I think I’ve been preparing this sermon for 26 years. Dealing with diversity, the church, the biblical text of Ephesians, and with a few shout outs to Methodism in between, here is Causes & Their Effects. It landed at this bottom line: When it comes to ethnicity & the local church, diversity is NEVER the Read the full article…

This Sunday’s Wake Up Call sermon and service is vital for understanding not only the Holy Spirit but Good Shepherd Church itself. I have love thinking about and then preparing this message, and I am unusually excited to deliver it. And as if that wasn’t enough, we’ve created the bestest, full coloriest, Holy Spiritest video Read the full article…

  Here’s one of the questions I recently asked each of our staff to consider:How can my schedule be as full of face-to-face interactions with people as it is full of nose-to-screen interactions with my computer? Answering that question well is one of the great challenges of ministry in the digital age. Yes, we want Read the full article…

For over 17 years now, I have taught the new member class at Good Shepherd.  The group’s current name is Next Step, as in “helping you take your next step in your living relationship with Jesus Christ.” In all of its iterations, one session out of the four (or five, or six) has remained constant:  Read the full article…

  One of my earliest memories — say from when I was four or five years old — is the awareness that I have a very unusual first name.And early on, I didn’t like it. First, it was easy to make all kinds of vaguely insulting nicknames out of it.  TalBUTT was the name of choice Read the full article…