Presby-Musings

This week I am concluding the sermon series, "Big Church," which has been both a study in the book of Acts and a vision for the way the Church should be in the world. I admit that I write that last bit with a certain amount of confidence, which might be interpreted by some as presumptuous.  "Who are you," they might ask, "to determine how the Church should be in the world?  What are your qualifications?  What right do you have to speak for the rest of us?" Or something to that effect. I don't have the right to speak for anyone, honestly.  I'm simply a pastor of a medium-sized church in a small town in the middle of Florida.  It takes me forty minutes to find a Whole Foods Market , or a proper Starbucks.  My platform isn't very large, and I have no national audience to speak of. But for the past several years something has been stirring in my heart, and as I read the story of the Church in Scripture I begin to catch glimpses of what ma...

This week I am preaching the fifth installment of the sermon series, "Big Church" a study in the book of Acts .  The basic premise of this sermon series is that Jesus did not establish an institution, he established a movement.  Unfortunately, his followers over the years didn't get that memo because the Church in all of her tarnished glory is most definitely an institution.  Which is why, in my opinion, that so many people have given up on the Church. But I think there's another way---and I am not alone.  There is a growing number of people who are waking up to the fact that Jesus did not create a mission for the Church, he created a church for His mission.  The mission, you see, was established long before the Church.  And it's high time we figured this out and got down to the business of moving the Movement Jesus founded. This week we will be studying one of the more familiar stories in the book of Acts---the story of Paul & Silas in the Phil...

This week we are continuing the sermon series, "Big Church," a study in the book of Acts that is based on the following premise:  Jesus didn't create a mission for the Church, he created a Church for His Mission."  In other words, the Church is a movement and not an institution. The passage of Scripture that we are plunging into this Sunday is from Acts chapter 16:9-15---the story of the conversion of Lydia. Here's the text: 9 During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10 After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. 11 From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, and the next day we went on to Neapolis. 12 From there we traveled to Philippi , a Roman colony and the leading city of that district[a] of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days. 13 On the Sabbat...

This week I am continuing my sermon series on the book of Acts , entitled "Big Church"---a series based on the idea that the Church is a movement, not an institution.  As we continue to affirm each week:  Jesus didn't create a mission for the Church, Jesus created a church for his mission. The passage of Scripture that I'll be preaching from this week is Acts 10.  Yup.  The whole chapter.  I tried to break it down a bit, but in the end I decided to just preach from the whole chapter.  I'm not going to reprint the entire chapter here in the blog, though. Click here to read the whole chapter, which I highly recommend that you do right this instant.   So this whole story starts off with a vision--- Cornelius , the centurion has one of an angel who tells him to go send for Peter , the Apostle, and then the story jumps to Peter who has a vision of a sheet full of non-kosher animals that he is commanded to "kill and eat." A word about visions migh...

This week I am preaching the third installment of the sermon series, "Big Church."  The entire foundation of this series is grounded in the notion that the Church is not an institution, it's a movement.   Jesus did not create a mission for the Church, he created a Church for His Mission. The text for the sermon this week is a strange little story embedded in Acts chapter 9 immediately following the dramatic conversion of Saul.  Here's it is: 36 In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha (in Greek her name is Dorcas ); she was always doing good and helping the poor. 37 About that time she became sick and died, and her body was washed and placed in an upstairs room. 38 Lydda was near Joppa; so when the disciples heard that Peter was in Lydda, they sent two men to him and urged him, “Please come at once!” 39 Peter went with them, and when he arrived he was taken upstairs to the room. All the widows stood around him, crying and showing him the robes and other...

God's ideas about fueling a movement are "whack." [If you don't know what the word "whack" means, you need a primer on your hip-hop speak circa 1989.  Or you can simply read the various definitions here .] Take the way that God transformed the Apostle Paul , for example. God decided that Paul (formerly known as Saul) was the perfect choice to give movement to The Way (which was what Christianity was called in those early days... I sort of like it better to be honest!). And that's exactly what Paul/Saul did. Without Paul there would have been no rapid expansion of The Way to the Gentiles, and eventually to Rome itself.  Paul accounted for 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament , not to mention being the Church's first real  theologian. Here's the thing, though.  If you didn't know how the story ended, you would have never predicted any of this stuff happening.  Saul enters the story of the Church as a bad guy. The passage of S...