Do you remember the grasshopper stories? In the American Midwest there were often times of severe hardship for many of the farmers and one of the recurring plagues was grasshoppers. They would sweep across whole counties and eat flourishing crops down to the ground. If you were host to a sky filled with millions of […]

As a youngster, any time I rode my bike home from town I’d pedal across the Monroe Street bridge and I could see on the right, the local power and light company. It was a landmark on the Spokane River and 38,000 families and businesses were dependent on it for both power and light. Recently […]

The love that saves us makes us kind. Want a measure of your closeness to Jesus? How kind do you feel toward the person to whom you feel the least kind? Kindness helps us get past the rough spots. Those places where we disagree. Kindness helps us deal respectfully toward those by whom we’ve been […]

Because I love churches and love to watch them grow, I follow quite closely the Barna organization and the research it does among Christians and non-Christians. In one of the interesting studies they’ve just completed they asked a ton of non-Christians and former Christians what kind of person they are apt to seek out if […]

There’s a new program going around the Christian community called First Fifteen. I like it. It is a strategy designed to encourage us to spend the first fifteen minutes of every day with God. In His Word. In His presence. Talking to Him. Listening. It’s a great idea, but I think we can build it […]

We know of a small-ish church, membership about 130; average attendance 40-ish. I know, with the pandemic that’s not too far off the norm. Fact is though, that’s not too far from where the attendance was running prior to the assault from Covid-19. The local church leadership was distressed. Few baptisms; few non-member guests. Spiritual […]

My name is Peter. I am one of Jesus’ original followers. You remember me as the one who talked too much. I could make three mistakes before the rest of the group could open their mouths. I had good intentions, but I was so impetuous they often took the form of humiliating mistakes. I was […]

My friend, Stanley, is a prayer warrior. With a capitol PW. He works in the Treasury office of our church’s world headquarters, helping manage its resources all over the world. And he’s good at it. You can catch him in his office from early till late, but let me save you some time. Don’t go […]

Okay, the best hunch is that there were somewhere between two million and five million people in the crowd. About 600,000 soldiers; assuming each of those was head of a family and had a wife, that’s 1,200,000. The Israelites tended to have large families. (Jacob would have a dozen.) It isn’t hard to come up […]

We were chatting with a couple of pastors this week, on opposite sides of the U.S. They were both wincing under the fellowship restrictions currently imposed on the churches they pastor. They find a significant number of their members are uncomfortable being in close quarters with others in a closed space, thus, their attendance is […]