God's Plan

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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I Am God

That’s a scary statement! It may be less uncomfortable if you assume that I am applying the rules for the title of a literary work by capitalizing each word. I could have been calling myself a god not the God but because it is a title it requires all caps. Then there is another possibility. I could be me attempting to grab the attention of the reader with the intention of pointing out that we are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27 NIV). Maybe in a strange way this does make us God. Maybe, but I am not comfortable even attempting to defend the suggestion that I am God because I am made in His image.

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Reports of My Death Are…

…greatly exaggerated. I really don’t know if anyone reported my death and if they did, I don’t know if they embellished anything other than the untrue statement that I had died. Yes, I have not blogged a lot. I have written weekly emails to the church I pastored during their transition, some of which will make great future blogs but that was the limit of what I could do. Writing blogs, as much as I enjoy it, is not something I could continue to do and still complete my transitional pastor calling. I did not die, I guess that is obvious by the existence of this new post, but I did struggle with some very serious health problems that have shown me that I may have been greatly exaggerating my own death.

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He Loves Me Just The Way I Am

I don’t know about you, but I find this comforting. In my life I have sinned too much to ask God to love me based on who I am or what I have done. To be loved just as I am, is a miracle in itself. While I believe I love others with some of the same unconditional love, I must admit I often fail. I want to be like Jesus. I want to offer truly unconditional love. I want to love like Jesus. I guess I just have to stop expecting others to do what is right, to change, to seek to be more like they were created to be, lowering my expectations so I can simply love. To be like Jesus is to love with no standard, no expectations; to live and let live, isn’t it?

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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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