Month: January 2015
Jeff Rudy ~ Justifying Grace
January 31, 2015
If we desire that Christ brings us the grace to renew us and breathe new life into us, that admits quite simply that there is something about and in us that is old and dead and in need of being renewed. So, somehow, someway we must come to terms with that in ourselves which isn’t as it ought to be, and to admit that we are not able to make ourselves be what we ought to be on our own.
“Selma” and the Embodiment of Discipleship
January 29, 2015
What if Christians were more intentional in embodying the very message we proclaim? The call to discipleship involves the summons to presence and practice.
Andrew C. Thompson ~ The Virtue of Pastoral Leadership
January 28, 2015
The similarity between the virtues and sanctification becomes especially clear when we grasp the connection between holiness and happiness. Holiness is a synonym for sanctification, which in the Wesleyan sense is seen as that state whereby our character comes to be defined by holy love.
Carrie Carter ~ Setting the Tone
January 27, 2015
Not long ago, God redefined for me what “setting the tone” actually looks like. For ALL of us. For me, the mom and pastor’s wife; for you, from the teenager who works fast-food, to the CEO on the verge of retirement; from the college student nanny, to the elderly, whose care is being overseen by hospice. The importance of the tone we set when we are with others has left me, well, no less than wide-eyed.
Talbot Davis ~ Hidden Heroes: The AWOL Hero
January 24, 2015
And yet look at what Paul says in Philemon: “was useless; is useful.” And then he grows much more intimate by the time of Colossians 4 – faithful, dear brother, one of you. And I wonder: how do you go from that to that? From outside to inside? From failure to brother? From deserves death to becomes family? I think of how easy it would have been for Onesimus to lurk in the shadows of the church even after his conversion, to stay detached, uninvolved, excluded, to be and get what he deserved. And get this: it would have been so tempting to use his past and use his failure as an excuse. They won’t accept me. I’m AWOL and a thief.
Talbot Davis ~ How a Reluctant Mentor Learns to Be an Adequate Leader
January 22, 2015
I have recently come to a realization that has helped me enormously in increasing my leadership ability when it comes to both the staff at Good Shepherd and younger clergy in the United Methodist Church…
Kevin Watson ~ The Methodist Band Meeting: Confession Is For Protestants Too!
January 21, 2015
Methodists gathered together because they were convinced that growth in holiness was most likely to happen in community.
Danny Morris ~ Asking the God Question
January 19, 2015
God’s will is absolutely the best that can happen to us under any circumstance. Cooperating with God doesn’t produce hardship, but harmony.
Mark Trotter ~ How to See the Future
January 17, 2015
We know that what we do here in Holy Communion is look forward to that day when life will finally be the way God wants it to be.
Elizabeth Glass Turner ~ Branded: The Iconoclasm of Marketing
January 12, 2015
The moment you slip from branding as an evangelistic tool to branding God, your logos and graphics have slipped from tool in service to God to weapon of iconoclasm – destroying an image. Hashtag simony. We do not create Team Trinity.
We are called to receive the brand of Jesus Christ (not his motivational verse t-shirt). Christ imprints himself on our thoughts, our emotions, our decisions. By his stripes we are healed, and there is no web analytics metric to measure the bleeding back of Word Made Flesh. We are called to be made into the image of God, to be bearers of God’s image, and anything that eats away at the image of God in us is violently iconoclastic.