This is a public forum to share ideas, ask questions, and reflect on being a pastor in the CRC.
Vibrant
Staci
Phillip 
Kelly
ElaineWrite your own blog post to share your ministry experience with others.
I was away from my church for two weeks. It’s called vacation. I am fortunate to have enjoyed some of God’s beautiful creation. I spent some good time with my family. What I realized I missed, however, was my church...
Try reading Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, or other dead poets. Even reading CS Lewis’ work can sometimes give you an appreciation for the short shelf-life of much of what we read. Then consider how much more vastly foreign the Bible is to all of its contemporary readers.
I’ve seen pastors happy and sad, fresh and broken. I remember one pastor telling me how he made sure his son didn’t go into the ministry. He didn’t want him making THAT mistake. I was glad I wasn’t his son.
In the late 90′s I was a pastor reading business books with my missional cohort in our Sacramento mission field. We were attending conferences at Willow Creek and Saddleback trying to figure out how to “create a safe place to hear a dangerous message.” It wasn’t just seeker methodology we were mining. We were exploring cell churches, house churches, multi-site churches, and just about any methodology that ...
“The church is full of hypocrites.” I regularly see Gandhi’s famous Christ quote on a bumper sticker at my child’s school. “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Fair enough. If you can’t find much of value in my tribe, I can appreciate...
My take on the Genesis flood is a bit different. A very common, perhaps the MOST common world saving strategy is “reward and rescue the good people, marginalize or eliminate the bad people.” This strategy in fact I believe is read onto the Bible.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing for Protestants to poke around a bit more in the early history of the Christian church. Ignorance of this era has allowed a fair amount of sloppy skepticism regarding what is pretty solidly knowable about the origins of the founding of our faith.
Young Steve Jobs was sharp enough to see the incongruities between the world in Palo Alto, CA in the 50s and 60s, the presentation of God at his Lutheran church, and the image he saw on the magazine cover of starving children in Africa. The dissonance he felt brought him to a crisis
I’d like to offer three data points and then some synthesis on individualism, a confessional church, and the future of our confessional witness.