I am sure that I am not the only one that is turning to scripture for comfort during this time of pandemic responses. This morning, my search took me immediately to Psalm 77, which begins with, “My voice goes up to God, and I will cry out.” This is our “go-to” for...
I read an article this morning in the New York Times with the headline, A Sunday without Church: In Crisis, a Nations Asks, ‘What is Community?’ Great question. Is it possible to be in community and still adhere to social distancing? At Asbury, we have been talking...
It was a summer day in Sychar. The women in the village made their daily trips to the public well early when the temperatures are cooler. Mornings around the well were as much a social club as a place to fill water jugs. The well was dug by ancestors of some of the...
Asbury Church Issues New Policies These policies in response to the potential spread of COVID-19 are effective immediately Flint, Mich. -- Today, Asbury Church issued new building usage policies and recommendations in the spirit of cooperation with local, state, and...
Have you ever gone camping? It's been a long time for me. I suspect that the thrill of sleeping on the ground under the protection of fabric, no matter how waterproof, starts to dwindle after a certain age. Camping is a tame way for us to have an adventure, among...
Does a fish, living in a fish bowl, realize that there is a world just outside where creatures take in oxygen straight from the air? A place, inhospitable to a creature with gills, custom made to extract oxygen from water? The fish knows only the water around it and...
We chose to recast the Daniel Plan as a set of tools within a larger framework that we are calling Life raft. When I tell people about the Daniel Plan their mind jumps straight to dieting. Worse, they imagine a diet of vegetables, or worse, they imagine a vegan diet....
We end our three-week, mini-series, that began with Jesus telling us to love our enemies, with the way of courage. And this week we focus on life-or-death sorts of enemies. Are we really supposed to love them too? During the first century, the Jewish people were...
The Season of Lent, which begins February 26, is seven weeks long. Including the partial week that starts on a Wednesday, we count forty days until Easter. That is when we don’t count Sundays. These forty days are symbolic of the time that Jesus spent in the...
We preachers frequently talk about the good news of the Gospel. And there are loads of newsworthy items to choose from in scripture as evidence. Some examples are immediate and physical, like restoring eyesight. Other good news items are relational, like the fact that...