Mental Musings

  Would Jesus be welcomed at your church? I would hope that most churches would, at the very least, think that He would be welcomed into their church. Perhaps a better question would be: would a smelly, dirty, homeless person wearing torn-up rags of clothes be welcomed at your church? That is not really an easy question with a simple answer. Many families with small children would stop coming if their church had a large group of sex offenders attending. Most people would avoid sitting near someone who smells bad. A Muslim woman wearing a hijab would probably not feel very welcomed at most churches. Neither would a prostitute wearing revealing clothing. I guess to really answer these questions, your church would need to decide why your local church exists. Are you there as a meeting place for believers only? If so, then you would not have to figure out how to handle a Muslim attending your church because they would not be welcomed until they converted to Christianity. Does yo...

Church websites are the digital front door for visitors. Research done by Monk Development found that 27% of new attendees found the church online and that 61% of that group indicated that the church website added to their decision to visit that church. Research  by Grey Matter Research has shown that people look for the following information when they visit a church website: 43% look for service times, 28% look for a map or directions, 22% check your beliefs, 15% check what denomination you belong to, 12% look for a way to send a message to the pastor. Most surprising is that 22% of all American adults have visited the website of a church in the past 6 months. Research by church planting director of Evangelical Covenant Church found that only 17.7% of Americans attend church regularly. Would a possible guest to your church be able to find the information that they need on your website? Yesterday I visited over 150 church websites and found it very difficult to get basic...

Why would anyone leave the security of a paid position at an established church in order to go into church planting? The obvious and possibly only valid answer is that they are called to it by God. If they are not called by God, they most likely will not last very long. However, there are often other underlying reasons. Some of these could be that: they don't like the design of most established churches, which are based on the traditional model of congregational control, or even worse, committee control with a few key individuals  holding all of the real authority of the church; they fell in love with a hurting community that has no real evangelical church; they are tired of working with a senior pastor that is focused more on caring for the needs of the members rather than reaching the community around them (for reasons why senior pastors do this, see number 1 above); they have a vision for something different than what they are currently doing; they don't fit in wit...

There are many fallacies when it comes to church polity; the operational and governance structure of a church or denomination-also denoting the ministerial structure of the church and the authority relationships thereof. In fact, it could be said that the almost every concept of church polity in the modern church is based on false teachings. The Catholic Church believes that all catholic churches fall under their authority and conversely the authority of the Pope. There begat the hierarchy that ensued flowing from Christ to the Pope to the rest of the authoritative collection. Each subsequent leader is ordained as a spokesperson for the Church, but only the Pope is a spokesperson for God. There is no Biblical evidence that shows this structure existed for the early church. The closest approximation to this design would be during the Jerusalem Council as seen in Acts 15, but it falls far short of initiating a hierarchy in the church or as a denomination. In this setti...

"As it is written: There is no one righteous, no not one." Romans 3:10 Dumpster diving has been very beneficial to artsy people. Finding items that were someone else's trash for free and turning it into a creative piece of art that can then be sold. You can tell a great deal about a person from the things they throw away, but sometimes that info can lead you to some false assumptions. If you were to go through my garbage right now, you would find a bunch of trash from McDonald's, a bunch of beer cans/bottles and those little plastic bottles of 80 proof alcohol, and a bunch of little broken items. Based on our garbage, it would be possible for somebody to put together enough evidence to convince people that we recently threw a wild party serving McDonald's food and lots of alcohol that led to some drunken revelry causing items to get broken in our home. It would be difficult to make that evidence stick, however, since anyone who knows me could tell y...

Too many Christians hide within the confines of the church. They attend every church function, every church training, every church everything. And then take pride in the fact that they were at church every time the door was open. We are told that we are to be in the world, but not of the world, yet many Christians do everything they can to avoid the world. My challenge for Christians is to get outside of the church and start making an impact on your community for Christ: show His love, be His hands and feet, share His light with a world that is no longer walking toward the darkness, but running headlong into it. We have been called to be salt and light. Salt left inside the cabinet does no good. A light that never enters the darkness is of little use. It is time to put on your spiritual big boy/girl pants (the armor of God) and get out on the battlefield. And stop trying to force non-Christians to act like Christians. You must first help people come to know Christ befo...

I can remember the first garden that I helped my dad plant. I was about 7 or 8 years old. It was a lot of hard work. We didn’t have modern gas-powered tools. We used spades and hoes to brake up the ground. This is a process called harrowing the ground. After that, we cultivated the ground by running a garden rake over it to break up clumps of dirt, remove rocks, weeds, and grass from among the dirt. Our hands  and clothes were smeared with dirt and we had splotches of mud on our face from the mixture of dirt and sweat. After the ground was cultivated, we would use hoes to furrow the ground in long, straight rows. Some of my rows were not very straight, but, hey, I was 7. Then we each took handfuls of seeds, got on our knees and crawled down each row so that we could poke little holes in the mounds created by furrowing the ground, dropped a seed into the hole, and then covered the hole with dirt. After all of the dirty work we watered the garden. Then we stood back ...

An Open Letter to the American Church: Political rights and doing the right thing often have nothing in common. Currently in the United States individuals, with varying ages of consent, have the right to kill their unborn baby, to marry a person of the same sex, to use the f-word in public, to have premarital sex, to pig out with fatty foods, to purchase pornography, and in some states to smoke marijuanna. These are rights endowed, not by our creator, but by our government. Yes, as Christians we can do whatever we want because God has given us free will. But this does not mean that it is pleasing to God just because it feels right or it makes us happy. "Everything is permissible, but not everything is helpful. Everything is permissible, but not everything builds up." 1 Corinthians 10:23 (HCSB) We were given specific guidelines by God as to what constitutes sin. That word is, or at least it should be, important to Christians because it was our sin that separated...

My dad with my brother and sister in 1963 If only I could have been a perfect dad. Imagine all of the wonderful accolades that I would receive from my family and my community and even the media. There might even be books written about my life and people would be requesting that I write a book sharing my secret to raising children and being a good dad. But I am not perfect. Far from it, in fact. Any man that becomes a dad will experience the same thing. You will be amazed that someone as smart as you could possible say something as dumb as what you just said to your daughter. You will regret many things that you did and things you failed to do. There will be days when you will feel as though you have ruined your son's life. And if not, he will probably be more than happy to tell you that you have ruined his life. No, father's are not perfect, but, in a day when so many children have absentee dads, those fathers who stay the course and put in the effort regardless of...

Every year, sometimes two or three times during the year, schools hold graduation ceremonies. When I was a student, I couldn't wait until graduation because I knew what that meant. It meant I was done. Finished. No more need to study. No more need to learn. No more papers to write. No more reports to make. No more tests. No more grades. No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers dirty looks. That feeling lasted for maybe a weekend. Then reality started to sink in. I had to get a job. That required me to write a paper, known as a resume. Then I got a call from a company and was told that I had an interview. That required me to study up on how to interview well. Then I got the job and was told that I would spend a week in training, which is job speak for learning. And at the end of the week I had to take a TEST. After a week of working I was told that I had to complete a report detailing what I did during that week. And none of this mentions all of the new thin...

I have a confession. I really find it hard reading Exodus 36-39. It has always been such drudgery to me. In Exodus 35 Moses tells Israel what God commanded concerning the construction of the Tabernacle. He goes into great detail. Almost as bad as an L.M. Montgomery book. Then for the next 4 chapters they repeat these details ad nauseam. So I wondered about the redundancy of this section. Why would God want it recorded? I believe that the phrase used at the end of each task gives us a clue: they did everything just as the Lord had commanded Moses. This continuing theme seems to show that God wanted a record of their obedience, especially following their failure to obey in chapter 32. God's anger had not completely subsided with Israel when Moses received his instructions. This detailed statement of the work that Israel did in preparing the Tabernacle of God was important for future generations to see. Following one of their greatest failures, they did everything the Lor...

You hide and I'll seek. At the sound of that simple phrase, children scurry in every direction in an attempt to evade being caught. Sometimes children are so good at hiding that the seeker never does find them. Today I was reminded of how well we learn to hide. After listening to a conversation about visiting Baltimore and never seeing the drug ridden and poverty filled areas of the city, I said, "Cities are good at hiding their faults." Another person responded, "We are all good at that." In a culture that has come to value the sharing of the most intimate details of our lives through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, 4Chan, and more, we are all still very good hiders. Some people are so good that we never learn the reality behind their masked smile or their cloaked comments. Why do we put so much effort into hiding? Perhaps it is because we have witnessed or personally experienced the humiliation of being found. Some seekers are bad sports a...

Today I met a man who is dying from AIDS. I don't want to use his real name because his family lives in this area. Let's call him Frank. This is the story that Frank shared with me: Frank has had AIDS for many years, but recently was told that he is now terminal. When he was 20 he moved out on his own after years of abuse at home. He left because he felt like killing himself, but he didn't want to die. He eventually moved to California. Frank never felt loved at home, so he turned to the streets looking for love. He found what he thought was love in the arms of another man. This led Frank into a lifestyle of homosexuality, going from one partner to another. Eventually he contracted AIDS. Something happened to Frank about two years ago that changed his life. Frank met a 17-year-old boy while in the hospital. This boy knew Frank had AIDS, and while he never judged Frank's past he shared with him about Jesus. Frank accepted Jesus as his savior and for the f...

I have a confession. Today I did something that I almost never do. It is not that I have a philosophical problem with doing this or believe that doing this is counterproductive. It is something that I have done in the past, just not something that I typically do. And I think I know the reason why. As I was driving through Baltimore on my way to a meeting, I rolled down my window and motioned over a man standing with a sign so that I could give him some coins. I didn't have much on me, but he was thankful for what he got. The light turned green and I rolled my window back up and drove on my way. I didn't judge him for his condition. I didn't assume that he would just take the few dollars in coins that I gave him and go buy alcohol with it (probably costs more than that anyway). I didn't insist that he let me tell him about Jesus if I was going to give him money. There wasn't enough time between lights to even get to know his name or hear his story. I ...