Apostles' Creed

I've been preaching through the Apostles' Creed this spring/summer. As I prepare my sermon every week, I summarize my sermon into a statement about what we believe. Now that I'm at the end of the series, I have a sort of re-done Creed. I thought you all might be interested.

We believe in an all powerful God who is not bound by time. We believe that he created everything there ever is or was or will be. We believe that because of his love for us, we can call him Father.
We believe in Jesus Christ who is God; our Lord who reigns over all things and who both stands as the uniting force for the church and serves as the church's role model for humility.
We believe that, though impossible by human standards, Christ was conceived by the Spirit and born of a virgin. we believe that nothing is impossible for God.
We believe that by the will of God, Christ suffered silently while he bore the wight of the sin of the world. He was crushed and tormented because of our sin.
We believe that the Holy Spirit came to be in and with the church on Pentecost. It is the Spirit that helps believers reach out to spread the good news of Jesus. It is also the Spirit who allows humans to respond to God's call.
We believe that on Easter Sunday, Christ rose from the grave by the power of God the Father. This resurrection gives us the hope in our resurrection and it is this hope that grounds our ministry.
We believe that Christ will come again from heaven, from the right hand of God where he is now justifying us, to pronounce final judgment upon all human beings. It is only by the grace of God that believers will be judged worthy.
We believe that the Holy Spirit draws together the members of he body of Christ into one holy, universal church. We have different gifts and abilities but instead of being divided because of that diversity, we should use those different gifts for the benefit of all our brothers and sisters in Christ.
We believe hat because of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, we can be forgiven from our sins. God will remove them because he loves and cares for us.
We believe that at the end of time when Christ comes again, our mortal bodies will be changed into bodies like Christ's. This is necessary because we are to spend eternity with God.
Knowing this, we work not in vain, but for the Lord as we await and hope for his coming again.

We Only Have Flowers After a Funeral.

We only have flowers after a funeral. A woman in my church lost her sister shortly after Kim and I moved here. We got two vases of flowers from that funeral. Today, I officiated my first funeral. The family gave us two baskets of flowers and two centerpieces that had flowers in them. We only have flowers after a funeral.

I never thought doing a funeral would be that hard. Jerry was well loved by the entire community. He had served in the town police force, the county police force, and was chief of police in the next town over from mine. Everyone knew this guy. Our sanctuary was packed. People even filled the extra chairs that were put up in the back.

I had a nice service put together. I wasn’t entirely sure how it would work out, this being my first service and all. The family had asked me to speak on Isaiah 40:30-31 and Isaiah 30:20-21. I felt they were fitting passages, even though I didn’t really know Jerry all that well. I knew that his life had been difficult. He suffered from alcoholism as a young man. His son died in a car accident at the age of 19. He had MS and had been confined to a wheelchair for the last five years because of it. Even though I thought the passages fitting, I had a difficult time putting together a message. How do I take passages and apply them to the life of a man I had only known for a short time? How do I honor his memory when my own memories of him are so brief? How do I say something that will comfort a family I’ve only known since October?

I ended up latching on to the fact that Jerry saw himself primarily as a child of God. Jerry knew his place was in the church. If you weren’t in church, he was the guy who wanted to know why and what you were doing that was more important. I even made the message slightly evangelistic, inviting others to see themselves as children of God. I don’t know if my words made it through the grief.

The service was hard to do. It brought up too many fresh memories of saying goodbye to my own grandpa. My heart broke as I watched Jerry’s grandchildren try to deal with the death of their grandpa. My voice broke a few times. In spite of that, the family was very appreciative. They told me I did a good job. That was nice.

I guess that my takeaway from this is that God really will give me strength. I’ve preached that enough times now that it almost borders on cliche. Today I got to feel it for myself. God gave me the strength to deliver words of comfort to a grieving family. It felt nice. Plus, now we have flowers for our dining room. That doesn’t really happen much. In fact it's kind of sad, because we only have flowers after a funeral.

C'mon!

C'mon!

     Well, I guess it's time for someone to post something.  I don't have much to say besides a little comical venting.  This is about overused phrases by church people.  Yes, even at Encounter we have church people with wayyy to much previous church baggage and it's starting to come out.  We recently did a survey and one question was about worship flow and here are the phrases that cause my soul to die everytime I read them:

     "We need to sing more good old hymns."  Really? Really? What makes one hymn "good, old" and not another? Shall I go buy a new organ for the occaision??? C'mon!  

     "As the church grows we need to start a choir."  Really? So 15 people who aren't on the worship team because of vocal ability can stand and painfully sing an awkward song no one has ever heard before and take up 5 minutes of time from the 1 hour flat service everyone wants?  C'mon!

And my most hated, most vague, most overused phrase from church people:

    "We need more of the meat and potatoes out of the sermon." Really?  Because you have God so figured out that if I spent 20 minutes doing the exegesis between vicarious and limited atonement and which one is more Biblical and Reformed you will grow closer to God?  C'mon!