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…
A Jesus Centered Community of Scripture, Faith, and Grace
Church Blog (Page 35)
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…
This week we kick off our Eastertide sermon series, “Signs of Life”. This series is one that I have been looking forward to, but is also one that challenges me. The whole idea behind the series is to look at seven biological signs of life, things that reveal that something is living. These signs are…
A pastor friend told me once about an experience he had as a seminarian visiting the church of a friend of his who happened to be a pastor’s son. Everyone in the service seemed enraptured by the sermon which had this refrain of “this is the day!” At the end of the service everyone left…
Holy Week starts this Sunday with the celebration of Palm Sunday (11am) and continues with Maundy Thursday (7pm), Good Friday (7pm), and finally with the celebration of Easter Sunday (11am). The theme of our Holy Week this year is “the Heart”. This whole year we are talking about the reality that “We are the Body,”…
The epic synthesized trumpets, the sultry licks of the electric guitar, the quiet percussion of the tapped cymbals in the background. It can mean only one thing – the “Rocky” training theme song. It’s probably playing in your head right now as you think about it. If it’s not, treat yourself by opening YouTube and…