I will be honest with you. I am not one of those jaded, post-consumer minded anti-holiday bah-humbugs when it comes to Christmas. I love Christmas, hands down my favorite time of the year. Love it all: the lights, the music, the holiday movies and specials, the gifts, the parties and dinners. Yep, it’s all just […]
Don’t know exactly where I came across the expression, maybe I thought of it myself (unlikely, but possible). Anyway, I say it all the time, so much so that people around me have taken to saying it too. It goes like this: unexpressed gratitude is ingratitude. Ingratitude is a big problem because what we do […]
This weekend we are celebrating Stewardship Sunday all weekend long. It is the one time of the year when we reflect on the financial stewardship of Church of the Nativity. We have been increasingly disciplined about this in recent years, eliminating fundraisers and other distractions from the giving God wants. We talk about giving that […]
This is a different kind of post: a brief look at my week. Why, you ask? Well, I was thinking, it’s already November. Where does the time go? Here’s where mine went this week. Saturday We successfully hosted our second ever church conference; as noted about 150 people, including our own ministry leaders and others […]
This weekend was our second ever, and hopefully annual, conference. Because of our forthcoming book, Rebuilt, we organized the conference’s main and break out sessions, on the book’s chapters. The main morning session, which I gave, was all about articulating the basic problem when it comes to churchworld these days. What is going on, what’s […]
The English idiom, “don’t judge a book by its cover” is a kind of moral admonition advising us not to prejudge the worth or value of anything (or anyone) based on appearances alone. Nice idea…except everybody does it, we all do it. We’re constantly doing it. Especially when it comes to books. Anyway, the process […]
From time to time, I like to give my faithful blog readers a little more information on what’s going on at our church behind the scenes and what is coming up. Here you go, in no particular order: New Series This weekend we begin a new series, “How to Be Rich.” It is a five-week […]
This is the final week of our current message series, “Life Apps.” We’ve been talking about the application of God’s word in our lives. Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at forgiveness, confession, encouragement and trust as life applications, basics in our approach to life and relationships. I have really enjoyed this series because […]
In little less than a month we host our second ever church conference. Saturday, November 3 will be a great day of worship, fellowship and discipleship, as well as going deeper in ministry and mission. Al and Rob and our house band will be there with unexpected as well as familiar favorites. Chris and Kristin […]
About a month ago our Pastor announced the second annual Matter Conference (November 3rd, 2012) right here on his blog. (To see that post go here) I’ll admit the first time he mentioned to the staff that we were going to host a conference I had to do a double take. I thought, “Who are […]
