Join in on God’s Mission
On Sunday, I spoke about how one of the very first things that Jesus DID was to launch the Christian movement - called the Church. He, alone, showed us who God is and what we as humans are meant to be, he inaugurated the Kingdom of God, and in doing so, abolished Satan’s reign over us. Even though he uniquely did these things, he empowered his movement – the Church – to participate in this work, giving us a substantive role with
Characters at the Cross
A guest blog by Rebecca DeLucia, Next Generation Pastor In today’s Bible Reading plan, we are in Luke 23—a chapter jam-packed with action, a slew of characters, plenty of plot, and so much more. In this chapter, we come across the stories of three unexpected individuals. None of them are the “main characters,” yet each shows us something about what it means to follow Jesus. The first character we meet is Simon of Cyrene. Simon doesn’t wake up that morning planning to serve Jesus;
To Such as These
Sunday’s message was all about how one of the most fundamental things that Jesus DID, was to inaugurate the Kingdom of God: the reality that God is truly in charge in a way that touches real life for real people in real ways with real meaning in the real world we really live in. In today’s bible reading in our Burning Hearts reading plan, Jesus (as he often does) addresses the Kingdom of God again, this time in reference to little children (“even infants”). Here’s what
No One to Help?
In this week’s bible studies, we’ve been looking at the story of Jesus healing the ‘invalid’ in John 5. (The phrase ‘invalid’ has always haunted me - that someone could be labelled as “in-valid”. But how often does our world “invalidate” someone, write them off, marginalize them because of a disability, a personality flaw, a public fall from grace, or just because of how they were born? More often than we’d like to imagine.)Anyway, Jesus asks him, “do you want to
Disappointment.
A few weeks ago, in our Jesus SAID (stories) series, I spoke about the parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8) - that in the face of her enormous disappointment and discouragement, Jesus encouraged us to "pray always and not to lose heart". It's an important message, as we all will and do face disappointment in life. Last week, former Central member Shawn Blythe (who moved to Delaware) sent me a short blog on disappointment that I thought is really worth sharing with