Article: The Mood of Christmas

Last week, I attended my last church council meeting for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. My term is coming to an end in July. Community Lutheran Church is a part of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) and I am honored to serve on the church council for the national church body. In…

It is Thursday before Christmas and all through the church… the Bethel staff have been working feverishly! They are getting ready for services on Christmas Eve. That is no exaggeration. Every staff person who came to church today has been tying up all the loose ends of all our Christmas planning to make sure everyone…

Blaise Pascal was quite the human being. Born in 1623, Pascal’s mother died when he was 3, and his father moved the family from Clermont-Ferrand, France, to Paris, where he homeschooled Blaise and his sister. By age 10, Pascal was doing original experiments in mathematics and physical science. To help his father, who was a…

There was a major shift in thinking that has contributed to the polarized times we live in right now. Sometime in the 1990s, truth became relative. What do I mean by that? For a very long time, we could agree on what is true for everyone and there was very little discussion about these truths….

  Who deserves to be lavished with God’s love? Christians? Good people? Kind people? Many of want to be arbiters of God’s love. We see it as a commodity to be managed and/or dispensed. Last Sunday, I talked about John 3:16-17 which is: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that…

“ ‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will fulfill the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. “ ‘In those days and at that time I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line; he will do what is just and right in…