• Bible Studies

    The Lamb of God

    1.  Hillary Clinton stirred up some dust this week with her statement that “great nations need organizing principles and “don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle.” She’s right about nations in particular but also about all organizations in general.  Whatever your organizing principle is will determine how you make decisions.  Your organizing principle defines you. That is why the lesson this week is on the Lamb of God.  That is the organizing principle, the organizing image for the Church.  It is not the Lion of God and the Church triumphant but the Lamb of God, the servant Church.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The Church is the Church only when…

  • Fred's Blog

    A Guide for the Perplexed

    The local newspaper is filled with stories of people needing help. Just yesterday I read about someone’s home burning down; a gravely ill child needing funds to cover treatment; low-income students in need of school supplies; and abandoned children looking for new families. The list seems endless because the stories we read today are replaced every news cycle by more stories of suffering. The pictures, horrors and over-stimulation of breaking news are numbing. It is easy to be overwhelmed with “compassion fatigue,” feeling that it is impossible to decide who and how to help. Of course, we could choose to respond to the world’s needs as Ann Coulter suggested this…

  • Bible Studies

    Guide For Giving

    It’s good to have Tom and Jennifer Alden with us this morning to bring us up to date on their work in Portugal.  As well, we are going to have a conversation by phone with Jeremy Courtney, the founder and Executive Director of the Preemptive Love Coalition in Iraq. Jeremy Courtney, founder of Preemptive Love Coalition, moved his family from Turkey to Iraq in January of 2007 to work with a nongovernmental organization, stirred by the overwhelming needs of the people there. It didn’t take long to identify pediatric heart disease as a major one. “Our response to a local request introduced us to a group of 700 other kids…