Making Disciples of Jesus Christ
I’ll just go ahead and say it: “I love the Church of the Lutheran Brethren!” As a young child, it was Hillside Lutheran Brethren Church of Succasunna, New Jersey that welcomed our family into the church. It was there that I first heard the gospel. In my...
Saving Faith
My name is Kris. I did not grow up in a church. As an adult, I believed that I was a strong woman and I could take care of everyone and everything. Who needed a church? I had me. I was a good person. That surely was my key to heaven.Then came the year...
An Unexpected Visitor
God has a divine sense of humor, as well as perfect timing. He sent us an unexpected visitor that we should have been expecting.It was October 14, and I was reaching the culmination of a pointed sermon. It was my third Sunday of unpacking our church’s proposed new...
Home for Christmas
Christmas Eve dinner cooked and waiting on the table. The presents wrapped and under the tree. The children anxious and ready to get started, but mother insisting that they wait for father. He had been scheduled to work the day shift at the local...
A Seemingly Insignificant Savior
We are naturally drawn to the flash and drama of a powerful savior. The Chicago Bears fan base has been abuzz recently with their addition of the highest paid defensive player in the NFL—Khalil Mack (7yr/$154m). Similarly, the Los Angeles Lakers are...
Advent: Hope to Come
The bang of the gavel echoed throughout the courtroom. For a moment I felt as if I was dreaming. In a flash, nearly a decade of memories, experiences, friendships and my marriage began fading away like a morning mist disappears from a deep valley as the...
Bought With a Price
“I could never do that. It would hurt too much.” I don’t know how I ended up so lucky, but several of my friends are foster parents, and some even became adoptive parents. We try to support them to the best of our ability, and we get to witness the...
Holiday or Holy Day?
As another Christmas approaches, we again face the dichotomy between a deeply spiritual celebration and a highly commercialized seasonal event. One way of understanding how Christmas has become, for many, a completely secular “holiday” rather than a...
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year: Why is it so Hard?
It’s that time of the year again, as the song goes, “The most wonderful time of the year!” I do love this time of year. I enjoy all the get-togethers and parties. But let’s face it. Christmas is not without its challenges. Oh, so many challenges…Christmas...
Two Sides of the Discipleship Coin
Chris Hartley: Recently I stood in front of my congregation for my ordination. I can only describe it as a truly surreal moment. Jason Lang, who was leading the service, had walked with me from the days when I had a near-agnostic attitude to becoming a...
Who Will Go For Me?
My name is Yuwei Bai (pronounced as You-way Bye), which means “something precious in the universe.” I am from Shanghai, China’s biggest city, with a population of 24 million people. (Texas has 28 million people.) I was not raised in a Christian family, but...
No Soap Opera Christmas
I saw a TV show about a Scandinavian woman who was cut off by her parents at age 16 because she wouldn’t live by the strict rules of their religion—one that we would consider a cult. The young woman grew up and had a daughter of her own. When the daughter...
The Die is Cast
There are moments in history that shape the future. Some of these moments are obvious, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, or the terrorist attack on 9/11. If you lived through one of those moments, you understood that...
Kingdom Secrets
https://vimeo.com/274308437 John the Baptist’s disciples asked of Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:3) The prophet John, the one man who should have known beyond any shadow of a doubt that Jesus was the...
Dramatic Farming: The Weedy Truth
https://vimeo.com/274921070 Matthew 13 contains more of Jesus’ parables than any other chapter in the New Testament. The Greek word for “parable” is parabole, from two smaller words: the preposition para, meaning “alongside,” and bole, which is related to...