Category: Newsletter

We just had a weekend full of music. Our friends Emily and Kelly Thompson came to do a concert for my wife’s music students last Saturday night. Then they stayed with us and came to our church the next day. I was thrilled when they offered to play and sing Be Thou My Vision in the service Sunday morning. Emily Ann Thompson is an accomplished Celtic fiddler who performs accompanied by her husband Kelly on guitar. As they were warming up before the service, I couldn’t help but grin at the sounds they were making together. I told them, “I’m going to hide your car keys so you have to be here every Sunday!” And I loved how they played and sang the hymn.

Be Thou My Vision may just be my favorite hymn of all. It’s over 800 years old, and when it’s played and sung in the traditional Celtic way, it does something down deep to my soul. When I hear it, or play it myself, I want to laugh, cry and shout for joy all at the same time. (I blame it on my Irish ancestors.) Music is powerful.Read More

When our son Josh was about five years old, he announced to us in a very serious voice, “I hate change!” And I thought, “Then you’re going to have a tough life, kid, because change is inevitable!” Not everything changes, but most things do.

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but church has changed. It isn’t like it used to be.

The first thing that probably comes to your mind when I say that is the style of worship music. And that’s true. Even in our very traditional church, we’re singing a lot of songs we didn’t sing a generation ago. That’s a good thing (if they’re good songs). It’s not like God blew a whistle in 1962 and said, ‘Okay, that’s it. I don’t want any more new worship songs written from here on!” I’ll bet some of your favorite Gospel songs have been written after 1962. But, despite the churches that have fought and even split over the type of music to be played, worship music style is really a fairly superficial issue. And too many churches thought that if they switched to contemporary worship music, people would come flocking in. It didn’t happen. It really doesn’t matter if you half-heartedly mumble hymns, or half-heartedly mumble contemporary worship songs. Either way, your heart is on display.Read More

As far back as I can remember, nearly every church service I’ve ever been in has had a “meet and greet” time. Baptist churches called it “hand-shakin’ time”. Some of the more exuberant churches called it “hand-shake and hug time”.

In more formal churches they call it “passing the peace of Christ”. I visited a Lutheran church with my family once on vacation. The minister said, “Now let’s all stand and pass the peace of Christ!” I felt somewhat alarmed, because I didn’t know what to do. Then I saw what everybody was doing, and I thought, “Oh, it’s just shakin’ hands!”

I guess it’s become more-or-less ingrained in the way I’ve led church services over the years. Once my in-laws came down to visit, and came to Sunday dinner at our house after the morning worship service. We gathered in a circle before the meal, and I asked the blessing over our food. As soon as I said “Amen”, my grandson Andrew, who was about 3 years old at the time, said, “Now everybody shake hands with 4 or 5 people!” We all laughed, and Rae Anne’s Aunt Kay said, “Well, we know somebody’s paying attention in church!”Read More

As I write, it is the day before the day before Christmas. Or as we like to call it at our house, “Christmas Eve Eve”.

By the time you read these words, Christmas 2014 will be a memory. But I’m still anticipating it, and basking in the afterglow of a wonderful Sunday spent celebrating Christmas as a congregation.

Someone wrote an article recently in which they stated, “Christmas time is to churches what Black Friday is to retail stores.” Honestly, that is true more often than not. This is why a few years ago, the deacons and I decided to purposely lead our church toward simpler, more scaled-back ways of celebrating Christmas. I told them, “If we have to act in an un-Christ-like manner in order to prepare to celebrate Christ’s birth, I’m not sure that really honors Him.” So we’ve tried to celebrate Christmas as a church in ways that don’t add more hurry and stress to people’s lives.Read More

Reposted from October, 2012

It’s easy to criticize. It doesn’t take much effort at all. It costs nothing of the one doing the criticizing. It is free advice, and most often it is worth every penny.

I have observed, both in myself and others, that criticizing the church comes easily, especially to the young. When I was younger, I was filled with a certain iconoclastic zeal (iconoclastic means, “to cast down images”, like Gideon did in Judges 6:25-32). I looked at the way churches were operating, and I was absolutely sure that if they’d stop doing things their old dumb way, and just listen to me and do things my new smart way, why, the heavens would open, the church building would be filled, we’d meet our budget, and the millennium would begin.

Then I was called to pastor a church where they basically let me do whatever I wanted to do. I got to change almost anything I wanted, and enact any new program I thought best. So I did. And do you know what I found out? I found out I had as many good ideas that don’t work as anybody else.Read More

Every Tuesday morning at ten o’clock my Dad meets with some friends from church for a late breakfast. They politely take over one corner of their local Bob Evans restaurant and spend the next two hours talking together. There are a lot of smiles and a lot of laughter. Sometimes, there are even some quiet tears. The food is important, but it is definitely secondary to the conversation and interactions these Christian friends have together.

Sometimes I am priveleged to join them. I go with my Dad and he always buys my breakfast, no matter how many times I offer to buy his. They usually have me sit next to or across from a wonderful retired pastor who is part of their group. His name is Glen Lockwood. He is the former pastor of Grey Road Baptist Church in Indianapolis, where this entire group attends. Pastor Lockwood has for many years been something of a mentor to me, and talking with him is like getting a personal pastoral seminar along with my breakfast.Read More

On a recent Saturday, I was watching my grandson. I had a wedding to do that evening, so I was in the bathroom shaving, while Andrew drew pictures in the dining room. Then I heard: knock-knock-knock-knock!

I said: “Andrew, was that you making that noise?” He said, “No!” Then I heard him run for the front door. I ran after him, wiping shaving cream and water from my face. He was already at the door. “Don’t open that door!”, I said. He looked back at me and said, “I’m trying to help you!”

At our house, most people we know come to our back door. When someone knocks on the front door, it’s usually salesmen, politicians, or the occasional non-Christian cult member. So I really didn’t want my grandson to open the door before I got there.

Wiping my face and hands one last time, I squeezed between my grandson and the door, and opened it to see a young man in a t-shirt, shorts and a ball cap, standing on my porch. I opened the storm door a little—with Andrew trying to push past me to see who it was – and I said, “Can I help you?”Read More

I know you all groaned inwardly when I told you I took over 1500 pictures while I was in the Holy Land. I promised not to make you look at all of them, but to my surprise, you willingly looked at a great many. When I showed some of the pictures in the evening service that first time, I honestly thought you would quickly get bored with them. I remember my grandparents coming home from vacation and showing us an interminable number of slides from their trip. It was all quite boring to me as a kid, and I had no desire to bore any of you in the same way.

But you weren’t bored. The Holy Land is different, isn’t it?

For my part, I’m glad I took all those pictures. I knew this would happen, but I’m still not happy about it: we went so many places, and saw so many different things, some of the details have started to blend together in my mind. I sat and talked with my son Josh the other day, and he reminded me of some things I’d forgotten about our trip. At least, I forgot them until he spoke of them. So I went back through my pictures (and even through some of the 2000 pictures Josh took), and it helped to refresh my memory.Read More