This week PJ is off at the LCMS National Convention. Which begs the question, what on earth is a convention? Convention is a triennial business meeting of delegates from the different circuits of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. These delegates attend to examine, discuss, and vote on both the elected officials of the Synod as…
A Jesus Centered Community of Scripture, Faith, and Grace
Posts from 2019 (Page 3)
We’re starting a new newsletter series that we will call “Connecting the Dots,” all about the readings that we experience on a Sunday morning. Normally speaking here at University Lutheran we hear 4 specific readings every Sunday: The First Reading – Normally the Old Testament, although in Easter this reading comes from the Book of…
As this newsletter is going out, I’m heading back into Tallahassee with my family after vacation taking time to visit my family. If you send me an email (and you haven’t sent me one in the last 48 hours), you will get my “autoresponder” that says, in part, “Thank you for contacting me. I am…
Perhaps the whole reason that we have the notion of a “Bible reading plan” is due to a man named Robert Murray M’Cheyne (sometimes spelled McCheyne). M’Cheyne was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who devised his personal reading plan in the mid 1800’s. The plan is actually two plans in one. There are two sets of…
If you flip open to the table of contents on your copy of the Bible, you may not realize at first that the listing there isn’t exactly “chronological”. Sure, it starts with Genesis (the beginning) and ends with Revelation (the end), but it goes through a couple loop-de-loops in between. Theses loops have to do…
There is something about having a great name, and this Bible reading plan has a GREAT NAME. The name of this plan is “the Bible Reading Plan for Shirkers and Slackers”. Rather than giving you a defined week by week set of readings, the plan simply separates the Bible into different days. So every Sunday…
For the next few weeks we are going to be reviewing different Bible reading plans to give you an introduction into some ways that you can start to read the Bible. Today we’re looking at “Reading the Word of God,” a Bible reading plan put together by three different Lutheran church bodies working together. You…
Recently, through the “Question of the Week” in our email newsletter, we found out that people wanted to grow most in the area of “understanding the Bible”. When we dug a little deeper, we found that this was coming from about three places: 1. “I feel like I don’t know where to start.” 2. “I…
I have heard that some people, when asking about your church will ask the following question, “what does your pastor wear to church?” The best answer is probably “underwear,” or if you want to get a little more specific, “socks”. (Sundays only, sometimes I come in wearing flip flops during the week.) As fun as…
Here’s your big word for the day, “Adiaphora”. “Adiaphora” literally means “it doesn’t make a difference”, and it is the Latin word used by the Lutheran Reformers to talk about things that don’t have a necessarily Biblical basis, but are a part of church practice. Confirmation is a good example of this. Nowhere in Scripture…