I spent several years of my undergraduate career tending bar at a place named “The Well Bar”. If I ever had a job that prepared me for pastoral ministry, it was this job. In fact, in a lot of ways, it was easier. I had a pulpit from which I stood behind, but it was…
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Church Blog (Page 31)
A Roman Catholic priest, a Baptist minister, and a Jewish rabbi go into the woods for a walk. Upon their walk, they find a bear. The Baptist minister says, “watch this,” and he goes down to the riverbank and begins to preach to the bear to the point where he ends up baptizing the bear.…
Brian Morris won the lottery. Not only did he win “free money”, but he won a lot of it – 125 million dollars to be exact. So what did he do with it? Well, Brian called up a local manure producer and put in an order. Pretending as if it was his own house, Brian…
If you haven’t heard yet, the Winters family is growing by one. We have our third child due in November of 2018. If you know our kids, you know that they don’t have very common names. We have a Cricket Belle and a Tempest Jane. And so naturally with a third child coming into the…
I had an idea. I’ve been working with Five Fold Survey stuff since about 2012, and so I know it pretty well. I’ve been working with University Lutheran for almost 11 years now, since 2007, and so I feel like I know IT pretty well. So why not try to take the Five Fold Survey…
Today is Ascension Day. It is the liturgical celebration that remembers the ascension of Jesus into heaven as recorded in places like Acts 1. It used to be a big celebration, and people would come out for worship services that recalled the ascension and its meaning for us. Today it’s just any other Thursday for…
Apostle, Prophet, Teacher – that’s how I usually score when I take the survey at fivefoldsurvey.com , the website that I mentioned last time about our personal interests and giftings. Those are my “home base” in terms of how I operate in the Body of Christ. This leaves out two giftings/interests from the list in…
This past Epiphany, we explored what we called “the Genome”. The idea behind the Genome was that if the Church is the Body of Christ, then it shares His DNA, His genetic coding. This happens in the case of bone marrow or certain stem cell transplants for cancer patients. The cancerous cells of the old…
One of my favorite cultural icons returned to Twitter this week. That’s right, friends and neighbors, this week @KanyeWest returned to the Twitterverse after almost a year of having deleted his account. I honestly don’t know what it is that I like about Kanye so much, but if I had to guess, it was his…
“You Lutheran pastors sure do travel a lot.” That was what a student (who came from a non-Lutheran background) once said to me when I told her I was going to be going on a trip. She’s right. Lutheran pastors tend to travel for things like Circuit Meetings (usually once a month, getting together with…