Friday, March 23, 2012

Sermon: “Out of the Darkness” - Suicide Prevention and Awareness

Last Wednesday (March 14) I had the opportunity to speak to the Baptist church about the issue of suicide and an approach Christians can take to prevent suicide and raise awareness of the issue.

I’ve been working with a community coalition for the past few years on the issues of substance abuse and suicide prevention. I’ve had the opportunity to attend a couple of statewide meetings on the issue of suicide prevention and postvention. Earlier this year, in January after attending one such event I felt that I could be a catalyst for doing more active work toward prevention in Petersburg. With that in mind I volunteered to head up a subgroup of the larger coalition, to focus more specifically on the issue of suicide. Part of that work for me includes awareness outreach to the Christian community in Petersburg.

The video is 720p HD and 36 minutes long.

Sunday, March 04, 2012

There are some that only conservative Christianity will reach…

… and there are some that only liberal Christianity will reach.

The raison d’etre for all Christians, regardless of one’s conservative/liberal bias, is to bring to everyone the good news of Jesus Christ offering to set us free from the power of sin. The Christian’s job is not to convert another person from conservative to liberal, or vice versa.

Every person views the world differently from another. Not every school of Christian theology will get a hearing by any given individual. As long as the goal for a particular school of Christian theology is not denominationalism or the theology itself, but rather the message that one can be freed by Christ from sin’s power, does it matter which school brings a person to Christ?

Rather than attacking one another, conservative and liberal Christians ought to learn to agree to disagree, to respect one another’s differences as God’s accommodation of reality in reaching people with different perspectives, and work together to stop slinging mud on Christ’s name for supposed doctrinal and behavior purity.

We need each other, even those with whom we disagree.

Saturday, March 03, 2012

New Blog to discuss Revelation

Our church group recently finished a year-long trip through the Epistle of Romans.

Beginning this week we begin our next journey: this time in the book of Revelation. I started a new blog, Revelation Road Trip, where our discussion outlines and a few highlights from each week can be found.