Church

Transition – Discovering God’s Call for Your Church

Many of you know that my calling is to a very specific field of ministry in the church. I am a transitional pastor. I help congregations discover God’s call for their collective of Christ followers. I met Bruce Cormier and his wife Lesia at my last transition. Together we, the collective of Christ followers called Cornerstone Christian Fellowship – Mimico and myself, set out on what ended up being an 18 month journey to understand what God was saying about the future of our church. We had a building. We had a small in-person congregation of about 30 and a similar sized online group who, in their younger years had attended in person. It took me 18 months to get to this point and Bruce managed to say it in just over 1500 words!

This little church has close to doubled in size and continues to grow under their new permanent pastor. The biggest question we needed to answer was about the building the church owned. As you read this, maybe your church needs to ask itself the same question they were asking:

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The New NoStick

I don’t usually do reviews on my blog. I love to cook and have used a variety of pots and pans. I am a big fan of cast iron and stainless steel because they can be used at high temperatures and don’t scratch easily. That being said, simple meals on no-stick pans makes sense. Me writing about no-stick doesn’t but me writing about NoStick does if you give me a chance and read on.

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It’s Like Putting Lipstick on a Pig

I know the phrase. I’ve used the phrase. One thing I haven’t done is tried putting lipstick on a pig. The logistics alone make this quite the monumental feat. As I said, I’ve never tried but if you use your imagination, you can hear the squeals, picture the battle of wills and even smell the… those with a less vibrant imagination are thankful they don’t see, hear, feel and smell the way those of us who can get lost in our own thoughts do. Putting that aside, putting lipstick on a pig is not only tough, it’s not worth the effort.

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Pause for a Moment

My wife and I took a pause from work and everyday duties in August. All though I would not call this a holiday as there were a few things that were scheduled, I will call it a great time to spend time away from work. The only problem is, I didn’t spend time away from work. Before you have time to assume that I am overworked or that I have poor time management skills, let me clarify what I mean.

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Jesus said;

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Matthew 6:28-34 (NIV)

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The Epistle of Jeremiah the Prophet to the Modern Church – Climate Change

Now that I have your attention… take a deep breath, relax, maybe go for a short walk or make yourself a cup of herbal tea, this isn’t going to be as divisive or political a blog as the title might suggest. As part of the race appointed to rule over nature we have a God given responsibility to be good stewards of this planet we call home (in case you are unsure if you are a member of the ruling race, looking at my picture won’t help; God gave the human race authority to rule over creation Genesis 1:28-30 (NIV)). Other than the climate change thing and bringing up race, how am I doing at avoiding controversial topics so far?

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