Presby-Musings

All throughout the month of November I'll be preaching a sermon series entitled, "Attitude of Gratitude," which is pretty timely considering by the time we finish the series, it will be time for Thanksgiving.   You're Welcome .  That's how I roll. What we learned the last time that we gathered together (I was out for a week with a busted mouth) was that there is evidence of God 's grace, blessings and favor all around us --if we are willing to see it.  In fact, we also learned that the every breath we take is a prayer of thanksgiving to God--as we say his name (Yahweh) each time we breathe in and out.  Which led us to say this... When you finally realize all that God has done for you, the only true response is gratitude.   I wanted to take things a step further this week.  We started pretty far out in the universe with the first sermon in this series--echoing the question that the Psalmist proclaimed: "When I consider the heavens... the moon and...

As we are quickly approaching a hotly disputed national election, I thought I would engage in some reading on faith and politics.  I'm also preaching a two-part sermon series called "God's Politics" the Sundays before and the after the election, and I wanted to start preparing. The book I am reviewing and recommending today is  Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching Politics with Humility, Grace & Reason  by Dr. Amy E. Black, Associate Professor of Political Science at Wheaton College . In a recent interview, Black explained why she wrote Honoring God in Red or Blue: "My book came out of an adult education class I taught at my church and from my work teaching at a Christian college. I recognized that many thoughtful Christians didn't know as much about the political process as they thought they needed to be active participants and a lot of folks wanted a basic primer about how it all worked.  I'm also concerned about the tone of contempor...

The Naked Anabaptist: The Bare Essentials of a Radical Faith by Stuart Murray ; Herald Press (2010) In The Naked Anabaptist, Stuart Murray makes a case for Anabaptism as the "original" emerging church movement .  It's a bold assertion, and one that has merit considering it was part of the 16th-century version of the Church's 500 year rummage sale (read Phyllis Tickle 's The Great Emergence for more about this).  Murray sees modern Anabaptism as more of a theological underpinning that could easily be embraced in a variety of Christian communities.  He also sees the end of " Christendom " as the perfect time for Anabaptism to find a real foothold in Christian culture.  Murray assumes as fact that we are living in a post-Christendom historical moment--a moment he describes thusly: the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story ans as the institutions that have ...