Category: Newsletter

I started playing the guitar when I was ten years old. My parents bought me my first guitar for Christmas that year. It came from Woolco, and cost the princely sum of $39.95! I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world…for a while. After about a year I began to realize just how hard to play my Woolco guitar really was. In those days inexpensive guitars were mainly “instruments of torture”.

I’d look at other guitars when I went shopping with my parents. They used to sell guitars and amplifiers at Sears and other department stores. These instruments also weren’t very expensive—or very good—but they sure were fun to look at. Back then, I thought that the more buttons and knobs a guitar had, the better it was.Read More

One of the things that amazed me after my shoulder surgery was how fast I lost muscle in my right arm. I would look in the mirror and think, “Good grief! I can’t believe how skinny that arm is compared to the other one!” As much as I enjoyed the medically-induced rest after my surgery, it came with a price. Inaction leads to loss of strength. In my case, it was prescribed and intentional, but the consequences were still the same. It really is true: move it or lose it. I didn’t move my shoulder and my arm for a while, and as a consequence I became significantly weaker.

I’ve been going through physical therapy, first to get back the range of motion, then to regain the strength that my arm had before. And it’s been a long and sometimes arduous process.

At first it didn’t hurt at all. The physical therapist would gently move my arm through a limited range of motion. All I had to do was lay there; the therapist did all the work.Read More

I’ve always had trouble going to sleep. It seems like it takes me forever.  I couldn’t begin to count the times I’ve looked at the clock at 2:00, 3:00 or even 4:00 in the morning. Even as a small child I can remember lying awake at night while all the rest of my family was asleep, crying because I couldn’t drift off.

I think I get it honest. My grandfather could sit down or lie down and go to sleep whenever he wanted. But my grandmother had difficulty getting and staying to sleep. As a teenager I would stay all night at their house and stay up to watch the late show. Grandma would get up about every hour or hour and a half, for one reason or another. She called it “prowling”. She had various explanations: “I can’t sleep.” “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.” Or my favorite: “My stomach’s upset. I need to drink some buttermilk.” (I never understood that one. Frankly, drinking buttermilk doesn’t settle my stomach.)Read More

The Bible says, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:14a) I usually take that fact for granted until something goes wrong in my body.

My mother used to say. “I don’t mind getting old, except the parts wear out.” I’m beginning to understand what she meant. As I write this, I am preparing to have arthroscopic surgery on my right shoulder. After a series of tests, x-rays and an MRI scan, they determined that I have torn the rotator cuff in my shoulder almost all the way through. People ask me, “How did you do that?” I wish I could point to some manly injury, but the truth is I don’t know how I did it. I guess the parts just wore out.

I didn’t even know what a rotator cuff was until I started having shoulder pain. Among other things, it hurt to lift my arm. For a while I tried to follow the advice of the doctor on the old Hee Haw show: “If it hurts when you do that, don’t do that!” But the pain kept getting worse. So I started reading about the shoulder.Read More

Three and a half years ago, young pastor Saeed Abedini was unjustly arrested while visiting his native Iran.

Saeed was born in Iran, but converted from Islam to Christianity and moved to the United States. He married a girl named Nagmeh, whose family was also from Iran. Nagmeh was a Christian, too. Eventually Saeed became a U. S. citizen and a pastor. He and Nagmeh settled in Boise, Idaho, and a daughter, Rebekka, and a son, Jacob, were born to them.

But Saeed was burdened for his own Iranian people, and would periodically return to Iran to help establish house churches and tell Iranians about Jesus Christ. The government of Iran took a dim view of this and warned him to stop.Read More

Way back in the late eighties (remember them?), the Christian band I was in decided to make a demo tape of some of our songs. We couldn’t begin to afford a recording studio, but one of us had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, so we went amateur all the way. We recorded at a band member’s house in Terre Haute, starting on Friday evening and planning on recording most of Saturday. So that we could work as late as possible on Friday, and get started as early as possible on Saturday, they asked if I could stay Friday night with another friend of the band’s in Terre Haute. This sounded better to me than driving back and forth from Coal City twice on Friday and Saturday, so I agreed.

In those days I was in an inner turmoil about a lot of things. Rae Anne and I had been married just over ten years; we had two young children we were raising; and, as the Apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 11:28, “And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.”…though in my case it was only the one church I was pastoring. All these things tended to weigh on my heart, especially at night.Read More

Every family celebrates Christmas a little differently. And every church does, too.

We’ll have Christmas-themed services at our church, as we do every year.  We’ll light the candles in the Advent wreath, sing the Christmas carols, read and study the accounts of Christ’s birth in the Scriptures, listen to the choir sing their special Christmas cantata, and see if the preacher can present the old, old Story in some new and attention-getting way. Other churches will celebrate Christmas differently, with more formality.

The word Christmas means literally “the Christ mass”.  It is the service at Christmastime in which liturgical churches celebrate The Eucharist, or what we call The Lord’s Supper. The word mass comes from the Latin word missa, which means “dismissal”. At the end of the service the priest would say “Ite, missa est” (or, “Go; it is the dismissal”). In time, that word came to mean the entire church service.Read More

Sometime during the summer or fall of 1994, while driving my family to the church I pastored in Brazil, Indiana, I saw a sign in front of a Southern Baptist church that read: “Come hear Dr. Moore tell about his trip to Russia!” It caught my eye because I’d been hearing about the phenomenal things happening in that country. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the Russian people had a wonderful openness to the Gospel and a hunger for spiritual things. I’d read a couple of books about this, but here was a man who’d actually been there. I told my wife, “I wish I could go hear that guy!” But since I worked on Sundays and rarely got one off, I dismissed the idea as wishful thinking.

A week or two later I saw a big article in the Terre Haute paper, interviewing this same man about his trip to Russia. His name was Dr. Alvis Moore, and he was the pastor of the church whose sign I’d seen. I devoured the article, and then a thought came into my mind: find this guy’s phone number and call him! So I looked in the phone book, found the church’s number, and called.Read More