Posts from March 2023

Dear Grace Family, As we begin the month of April, I want to make y’all aware of two changes we are making to our weekly order of worship. The first of these is in the morning worship service with the other being in the evening. Moving forward in the morning, we will be replacing The Hymn of Pardoning Grace with The Doxology. There are a few reasons for this change. First, with our current slate of four hymns each Sunday…

Dear Grace Family, As I’m sure nearly all of you are aware, a sister church in our denomination experienced an unthinkable tragedy yesterday morning. A shooter forcefully entered The Covenant School, a ministry of Covenant PCA in Nashville, TN, and murdered 3 children and 3 adults. Included in that number was the daughter of the church’s senior pastor, Chad Scruggs. Words fail us at a time like this. Our emotions betray us in a time like this. The clearest refrain…

Dear Grace Family, I introduced y’all to Dennis Johnson’s book The Message of Acts: in the History of Redemption before we began our study in the book of Acts. Let’s read some of his thoughts on the church and see how they hit us… “We were made to live together, with each other and with our God. Of course, if you pack sinful, selfish people together in close quarters, the pressure intensifies the destructive tendencies of their fallenness, sometimes to…

Dear Grace Family, “Always keep your eye on the ball.” How many of you have heard or used that expression when learning or teaching how to play golf, tennis, baseball, or even ping pong? What is meant by that sentence, of course, is that there will always be distractions when playing any of those games, but if you’ll just focus in on the ball your chances of success exponentially increase. As I’ve been thinking about our life together at Grace…

Dear Grace Family, I was catching up with Charlotte Taylor on Tuesday about her time at a recent women’s ministry conference put on by our denomination. One of the tools she was given was the “women’s ministry diagnostic tool” which includes a set of 11 questions to help evaluate the health of women’s ministry in a particular church. Well, I immediately read the questions and was struck by the fact that if we replace the word “women” with “me” or…

Dear Grace Family, Is busyness a virtue? It happens every year about now. Winter basketball season hasn’t ended but spring baseball season is already underway. Laura Lee and I consult our calendars looking for the next night we have nothing and realize it’s months away. How on earth did we get so busy? There is a theological, philosophical, sociological, and historical way we could answer this question, but I’m not sure how far down the rabbit trail I want to…