This can be a stressful time of year, and active church members are perhaps even more likely to overdo it. Each of us has so many events – office parties, parades, school events, choir practice, Sunday School parties, church dinners – in addition to shopping, wrapping, and planning time for family that it can easily be overwhelming. It may be difficult to find time but we must pause and give priority to the things that are the most important. Continue reading
Category Archives: blogging
Thanksgiving Day 2014
The Master’s Table – offering God honoring, Christ centered blogging since 2008. On the one hand that’s pretty awesome. On the other hand that means annual activities, like Thanksgiving Day, have already been done. I’m not sure I have much more to say on that subject.
Here is a Thanksgiving sermon that I was looking at earlier this morning. I found it lurking in the dark shadows of the archives, all the way back from 2008. I preached a very similar sermon this year without even realizing this post existed. A key difference was the inclusion of Revelation 15:3-4 which relates the Song of Moses to the Song of the Lamb solidifying Moses as a type of Christ and connecting the Old Testament to the New.
I did write something new this year on My Other Blog. #27 on my 30 Days of Thanksgiving adventure could alternately be titled I Am Thankful for Thanksgiving. I put on my history teacher hat and outline the ways in which Thanksgiving is and is not a religious holiday. Easter and Christmas are Christian holy days, Thanksgiving is sort of the 4th of July of religious holidays. It’s as American as pumpkin pie. (wink)
30 Days of Thanksgiving
November is National Blog Posting Month – NaBloPoMo – when bloggers commit to posting at least once each day for 30 days. I accepted the challenge in the form of 30 Days of Thanksgiving. While I haven’t posted much on this blog lately, I am up to day #13 on My Other Blog. The most recent post is about the annual Pastor Appreciation event in Atlanta hosted by Faith Talk 970/ 104.7 The Fish. Several SBC state conventions had their annual meeting this week and I will be writing about the Georgia meeting soon.
There is a My Other Blog RSS feed in the left-hand column of this page or click here to check out the latest posts. 30 Days of Thanksgiving because God is good all the time!
The Read and Share File: What to do with False Gospels
Matthew Harmon shares three ways to respond to false teachers and false gospels. Based on Titus 1:10-16 he says we must recognize, rebuke and resist.
Wednesday Link List
Followers of our Facebook page know that every Wednesday we post a link to the Wednesday Link List via Thinking Out Loud. That site is acting a little buggy right now and the The Master’s Table page is not working at all. Not everyone is on Facebook so it’s good to share a little link love right here every now and then. I don’t know how he does it but Paul also posts every other day of the week, not just Wednesdays, so you might want to check out some of his other work as well.
Variation on a Theme
I got some good advice early on when it comes to blog design: find something that works and leave it alone. Some people spend more time switching themes and changing colors than they do writing. Messing with the major design elements, such as theme, isn’t something I do often.
You will not see any changes at The Master’s Table, but the three column theme was just no longer necessary on My Other Blog. I did a major overhaul Thursday morning and spent the day tweaking things to get the look just so. I think you will find the text easier to read if nothing else. Then last night I noticed something that had been overlooked; page view number one million slipped by sometime in recent weeks. If you’re heading over to the Other Blog anyway, check out this post on a difficult to calculate milestone.
And thanks!
Thank You for Following
I’ve been blogging since 2008. Back then everything was about blog rolls. If other bloggers listed you that was a good sign. I worked to build a useful blogroll so that readers could interact with my blog friends and vice versa. Today blogs have integrated with social media. There are over 150 followers of the Master’s Table Facebook page and sharing any blog post with Facebook or Twitter is as easy as one click.
For those of you who follow – via email, RSS feed reader, social media or what-have-you – thank you. That’s all. From one Christ follower to another, peace and God bless.
Small Churches, Bi-Vocational Pastors, and Their Role in the SBC
Let me first mention the new look of the Baptist Press website. The new site design rolled out yesterday (Sept 17) and includes a few new features as well.
If you looking at the new BP site anyway, go ahead and read this article about the first meeting of the Bivocational and Small Church Advisory Council of the SBC. Continue reading
Read & Share File: When the Pastor is Terminated
Research indicates that as many as four in ten pastors will be forced to leave a ministry at least once during their career. Hershael York and Jeff Iorg outline how to prevent terminations that are often unnecessary and offer advice on how to deal with conflicts when they do arise in this article via Baptist Press.
On the list of top 15 reasons pastors are fired/ forced to resign, only two are related to sin on the part of the pastor. Ethical conduct comes in at #8 and sexual misconduct #10. Many times issues relate to personal communication skills or a few disgruntled members that spiral out of control. Sometimes it is simply time for one’s ministry to come to an end in one place and move on to something else. But the old saying is that figures don’t lie; nearly half of all church pastors will deal with these issues sooner or later. The advice in the BP article is sound and it wouldn’t be a bad idea for church members not in the pastorate to give it some consideration.
-Hershael York is a preaching professor at Southern Seminary as well as a currently active church pastor. Jeff Iorg is president of Golden Gate Theological Seminary. The image above and original text of the article are copyright 2014 Baptist Press.
In Real Life
I have made blog friends over the years in some far and distant places. The information age makes the world a smaller place. Every now and then I meet a person in real life who blogs.
The same freelance writer who created this piece recently started a local writers group. Check out The Golden Rule of Writing at Amber Nagle’s self-named blog and then consider reading other offerings as well. At our most recent meeting we discussed strategies for platform building so here’s a head nod at a fellow writer and new friend IRL. (I presented on the topic of building one’s online platform, imagine that.)
The Master's Table 