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Starting Galatians

It is our plan that me and my friend, Torey will be collabratively reading and discussing Galatians in order to make our discussion time w/ the youth this summer that much more focused and sharp. We'll see how that goes! We have discussed doing that through using YouVersion -- a kind of community focused bible study blog site. It's pretty cool.

My plan is to post some links to what Torey and I are discussing here in hopes that you might join in w/ us in reading and discussing!

So here we go...

http://www.youversion.com/contributions/58170/galatians

Summer Reading

I'm the kid who NEVER did his summer reading for school. It seemed like a bad deal... I mean its not like I got to take the best parts of summer into the long school year (sleeping in, random games of sandlot baseball and home run derby breaking out at any moment, ice cream trucks, etc.), so why should I have to take such a unfortunate part of school and let it be part of my glorious summer?

However, I did do some pretty serious summer reading one summer... the summer of 1998. That was about the time I began reading the Bible daily. Since that time I wish I could tell that I've always love to read Scripture and that each time I open that old book God whispers really cool stuff in my ear and my hair turns bright white (like in the old ten commandments movie) and I know exactly what God wants me to do. But that hardly ever happens!

what I usually find is that I hear God speak most clearly through Scripture when I read it together with other people and we look into that book and take it seriously enough to ask questions about what we read in it and seek to find ways to put into practice what we discover God inviting us to do and be.

This is what we'll be doing together during the Summer HUB.

Last summer we, the youth of Aldersgate, read through the book of Acts together. And that is something that I think we'll do again sometime soon. But this summer we'll be spending our time reading through two shorter epistles, Galatians and Colossians.

In the month of June we'll take on Galatians.

And what I will be doing... and what I challenge each of our youth to do... is to read through the whole letter every two days. There's 6 chapter in Galatians -- that just 3 short chapters each day.

If you'll commit to this practice then our time of discussion at the HUB will be exciting, deep, and helpful to us as we seek to be not only hearers but doers of God's word.

Living the Resurrection: Be a Dorcus

As we continue celebrating the great 50 days of Resurrection, they even let the youth pastor preach! If you've got 15 mins. on your hands take a listen!

Living the Resurrection: Be a Dorcus

Acts 9:36-43

Devotions for the Great 50 Days of Resurrection

Each week the staff of Aldersgate gets to write a little devotional for the 50 days of the Easter Season. This week was my week.

The Shepherd Who Leads Us

Revelation 7:9-17

John 10:22-30

Psalm 23

As we move toward the fourth Sunday of this season of resurrection, the Scriptures that come from the lectionary talk an awful lot about Jesus as a shepherd. With that in mind I recommend all of them for your reading this week, but would like to focus specifically on the passage from Revelation chapter seven.

A careful and responsible reading of the book of Revelation does a lot to help form and stretch our imaginations regarding how we should live in a world where God, in Jesus, has overcome the enemies, sin and death, even when (especially when) it doesn’t look like those enemies have really been defeated.

In the season of Lent we spend time reflecting on the ways in which sin and death still clamor to take hold of us. We come face-to-face with our mortality, our weakness, and all those things of which our conscience is most afraid. We spend forty days in this wilderness, and as it draws to a close and we think it couldn’t get any darker, we walk into Holy Week. And there we watch carefully as Jesus marches resolutely to the cross where sin and death do their worst to him. Like a sheep to the slaughter he is crucified, killed, dead.

But thanks be to God that this season of Lent gives way to the Easter season. And the picture painted for us here in the book of Revelation is one that is informed by the Easter season. It’s a picture of a reality that can only exist because early on that first day of the week Jesus, the crucified One, rose from the dead… VICTORIOUS over sin and death!

And what we see here in chapter seven is a glimpse of what it’s like to REALLY go to church, to REALLY worship the Risen Jesus. Here we see the fulfillment of God’s ancient promise to Abraham. Remember that promise?

God promised to make a people for God’s self that would be from every tribe and nation – that it would be too great a number to count. And that is precisely what we see here as those dressed in white worship saying, “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

And this enormous group of people are formed and gathered around that Lamb, the Lamb who was slain. And this Lamb, still bloodied and bearing the marks of his suffering, stands alive, victorious with God, waving the banner of God’s triumphant kingdom.

And we, most especially during these Great 50 Days, are invited into this scene, as the Lamb who was slain stands risen and full of life and now like a shepherd leads us in a grand parade of great celebration and victory as we worship the God who has come to us and saved us!

During these Great 50 Days let us worship God with renewed passion and serve God day and night, “for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be our shepherd; he will lead us to springs of living water.”

Let us Pray:

Savior, like a Shepherd lead us through these days of celebrating your resurrection – your victory over sin and death. Give us your Holy Spirit that we might follow you without fear or reservation, that we might live the resurrection, here and now. Amen.

Confirmation Sunday & Stories from the Faithful

Last Sunday we celebrated Confirmation Sunday at Aldersgate. After more than four months of preparing, we received 5 sixth graders who professed their faith in Christ and committed to be a vital part of our faith community.

That's a pretty tall order for a 12 year old (and anyone really)! If it were not for God's remarkable ability and desire to take open and willing hearts and make them into faithful witnesses and disciples of the Risen Jesus, confirmation would be a silly thing for us to do w/ sixth graders.

But as I was reminded this week... God loves to do this very thing!!!

I had the chance to sit down and talk w/ some of the eldest members of Aldersgate. They were a part of Aldersgate before it was Aldersgate... when it was Forest Ave. Methodist Church. As I asked them to recount the way God had worked in their lives and how they came to surrender their lives to Christ, one by one they said things like, "Well, you know I've just never known anything else. I've always known God's love for me and always been a part of the church. I guess if I had to say when that really began for me I would have to say when I was 12 years old I joined the church."

As we talked together they kept saying things like, "Oh, I just love Him!" and "Oh, I just talk to Him everyday... ALL day." They'd look me intently in the eye and say, "If you could only know all the things God has led me through!"

Though not one of them could point to some kind of dramatic experience in which God saved them, each of their long lives lived in humble faithfulness, to me, bears a much more substantial and radical testimony.

And I could not help but hope and pray this same kind of life w/ God for our five confirmands -- who for the most part have spent their whole lives up to this point in the church. I hope that they will be able to look back on a life so entrenched in God's love and work that they will say in their old age, "I've always know God's love and I guess if I had to say where that really started for me... I joined the church on April 11, 2010, when I was 12."