Just a couple of years after ReCAST Church was getting off the ground over a decade ago, I was asked to join a group of community leaders about starting a food pantry in Mattawan that would be a collaboration of local churches and businesses. There were some small disconnected groups that were each serving several…
The church has been a stable influence on culture down through the ages. To be clear, the church has changed in traditions and in externals, but her mission has remained the same! We still proclaim a risen Lord. We still proclaim love for God and love for our neighbors as ourselves. We still gather together…
I would like to officially declare 2020 the year of the question mark. It has been the year of unanswered questions. And even the year of very slow answers. The questions range from, “How does this virus spread?” to “Who will lead our nation into this next four years?” The questions have also been very…
My blog is an intentional look at the world around me. My sermons are an intentional look at God’s Word. There is not a lot of exposition of daily life in my sermons. Instead, on Sunday we look at what it means that God breaks into our world with communication. He speaks and we seek…
If I had a dollar for every time I read or heard the phrase, “I just don’t know how a Christians could vote for _________” I would be able to go to Disney and maybe even take my family with me. But at the risk of entering into a political discussion as a pastor, I…
I keep hearing comments and seeing memes that act like 2020 is a curse word. And although most of those things are just meant to be jokes, I think it is clear that people are tired of everything we have faced since January 1, 2020. But there are still good things. And I realize that…
There is a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech that has resonated deeply in my soul. As a person that grew up in a very homogenous white farming community in Michigan, I only had the thing I read to go on. I read the speech in high school. And this…
I think all of us have had a fairly common experience in the past several months. We all certainly face our own unique mix of troubles, but one thing is common. It has been a hard time. There was the early stress of quarantine and learning new habits of working from home. There has been…