Posts by Seth Starkey

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…

Dear Grace Family, Somehow, we’ve already made it through 6 weeks of our Wednesday night study for the semester. I found it hard to believe as I checked the last February date off my sheet last night. What are some of the themes you’ve noticed uniting the various prayers we’ve studied together? There are 4 words I keep coming back to as my thoughts return to our time together each midweek – literacy, humility, dependency, urgency. What do I mean…

Dear Grace Family, I want to try and cover two things today being as brief as possible with each of them. First, as the busyness of the holiday season and transition into the new year have passed, I want to make sure y’all are in the loop on our 2023 church budget. Second, I want to give just a few introductory comments on the book of Acts to help prepare us for our upcoming sermon series that will begin this…

Dear Grace Family, As your pastor, I often think through the question of what our identity is as a church. Or to put it another way, if you had an elevator ride with someone and they asked you, “what is Grace Pres like?” what would you say? I think it’s important for all of us, not just me or the officers, to think through who we are as a church and what it is that keeps us coming back. There…