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Sunday School
If you talk to certain people, you would get the impression that children were never in church. That church isn’t really for them, anyway. It’s for adults. Kids need to learn about church before they can be in church, they argue. This certainly is not true. Sunday School was only created at the end of…
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Sermon as Teaching
My Dad’s a good preacher. He isn’t the lift the roof off the rafters type. Nor is he egg-heady with scattered references to German theologians. And he isn’t a daily living preacher, either. He doesn’t do genre. He does story and he tries to make sense of the gospel and what people are dealing with…
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Preach
“Woe is me if I preach not the gospel” Outside the chapel, Paul’s words belie the most simple of Christian conditions. The call to serve GOD through Christ is deeply personal. “Woe is me,” we might argue, “not woe is we.” Then we keep going. “Woe is me If I preach not the gospel.” This is on…
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Gospel
I first really heard the gospel in school. I was in an undergrad Bible class on Paul; the kind of distributive requirement that seemed like a natural fit for me. English major; PK (priest’s kid). The professor was an Orthodox bishop, Makarios. And his thick Indian accent meant that we had to really listen. Listen…
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New Testament
The New Testament is about Jesus. The later testament, this one written in Greek, is simple really. It tells the story of Jesus and then his followers. In some ways, the text we refer to as the New Testament never gets much more complicated than that. The complexity doesn’t actually come from the Greek Scriptures…
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Old Testament
Let me begin by saying that I shy away from the term “Old Testament”. Yes, I’m one of those people. My concern with the name (and its companion, the New Testament) is not that they aren’t PC enough. It is that they are too narrowly prescriptive and restrict the beauty and depth of our scripture.…
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Psalm
The psalms are the odd duck of the Bible. As a book of Scripture, they stick out. They are like the weird friend who is an exceptional pianist or the anti-social kid who can make exceptional speeches. The Psalms are remarkable reading. But they aren’t a story. They don’t tell the story of creation or the birth of…
