Presby-Musings

Yesterday I returned home after spending a week in Guatemala with the various mission teams sent by my church in Austin, Texas.   I had the unique privilege to move from team to team over the course of the week, staying in different parts of Guatemala, and seeing how all of our mission teams work together to create unique, sustained partnerships with ministries and organizations within Guatemala.   And it also happened to be the first foreign mission trip for my son Jackson.   I will be forever grateful to the adult leaders of his mission site (an orphanage where some 70-80 children live) for all they did to care for and encourage him while I was moving from site to site.  The trip had a profound effect on him---I can tell he's still trying to figure out how he feels now that he's back home.     One of the adults on the trip told me that bed Jackson had selected for the week was pretty terrible. At one point, they told him he needed to move to ...

This week I am preaching the conclusion of the sermon series, "The Missionary Next Door: learning to be a witness where you are." Before we get in to the text and start digging around, let me ask a question:   How good are you at picking up on non-verbal cues? Non verbal cues are the subtle facial expressions, body language and gestures that tell you what someone is really thinking even when they may not be speaking. Most of us have at least some experience with these kinds of things. How can you tell if someone is really listening to you?  If they are wearing a shirt like this:  They probably aren't listening. Just a hunch. How can you tell if someone is lying? "They're a politician and they're talking..." probably went through your head right then.  It went through mine.  There's something to that, to be sure. What about this?  Think about a moment when someone communicated their faith to you without saying a word. Recently, I was...

T his is a picture of James and I that was taken by my wife. She insisted on taking it. We are standing in the library of my 125 year-old church--a library that also doubles as a huge reception/fellowship space. When this picture was taken, my church had just held its annual Christmas concert, which is only the biggest event of our entire year. We had over 530 gaily dressed folk at the concert, which was a record, apparently. There was a huge reception after the concert with four long tables filled with food, cookies, pastries, goodies, punch, eggnog and other assorted holiday fare.   James had been standing outside the library door, afraid to come inside and wanting to talk to me. Quite a few folks ignored him or walked around him until someone came inside and told me he wanted to see me. Here's the thing, James is a homeless man, who lives on the screened-in porch next to my office. The reason he is living on my office porch is complicated and almost entirely Mark's fault....

Tonight my wife and I had dinner with her cousins Mark and Alisa Langley, who are two 40-something former Registered Nurses who gave up a nice life here in the United States and moved to Thailand to live in intentional community with the Thai people.  Their organization provides scholarships for about 16 Thai teenagers to attend school, live and work together in community with Mark, Alisa, their two children, and their mission partners.   They embrace the outcasts in Thai society---tribal hill people, those who are infected with HIV, the poor---as an outpouring of their Christian love.  There's no door to door evangelism here, no huge healing services with loud, boisterous, hellfire and brimstone preachers.  Just simple people living among the world's poor, demonstrating the kingdom of God.   Their ministry to those who are infected with HIV is incredibly moving.  In Thai culture, misfortune is heaped upon those who are wicked or inherently bad.  If you are infected with HIV...

Okay, If you are wondering why I am starting with a Pt. 2... Just so you are aware, Pt. 1 to this little essay can be found HERE .  I am currently working on a sermon series that explores the Great Ends of the Church.  You can listen to these sermons online .   Here's something that I have found to be true... Fear and anxiety are at the heart of every controversy, division or argument that has occurred and will occur within the Church, the Body of Christ.  Seriously, scratch the surface of every schism and you will find a fearful and anxious people seeking to find meaning and stability in the only way they seem to know how to find it...  by fighting.  So when one of the elders in my former church began fomenting division within the congregation by complaining about our plans to take a small intergenerational group from the church on a mission trip to Mexico, I should have realized more clearly what was happening.  But I didn't.  Instead I took it personally, and got mad.  Hones...