Stopping to Think

What follows is the letter I wrote a couple of days ago to the chairmen of the Republican Party Central Committee in my county, on which I served until, well...when I sent this letter. Co-chairs ___ and ____, I write what follows most regretfully, and not without much thought and prayer. I am resigning my place on the Central Committee and plan to change my voter registration from Republican to Independent.  I determined many months ago that I would not, and in good conscience could not, vote for Donald Trump for President. I was content to keep that opinion largely personal unless asked for it, and hoped to see Trump mature, while surrounding himself with quality individuals as others in the party simultaneously worked to move the party writ large in a more conservative and constitutional direction.  What has happened has been precisely the opposite. Trump has continued to show himself for exactly who he has always been: a bombastic, small minded, morally repugnant, ...

Ambivalence. Questioning. Lack of surety. Phrases and words such as these seem to describe many Americans relationship to abortion.  Look at those videos ? Eh, I couldn't do that...Facebook beckons me away... Well, okay. Now I've watched them...but what can I do? I'm one person, and I can only control me. Not Planned Parenthood. Not the Federal Government. Not the millions of parents who have their children killed every year. Just me. And that doesn't seem like much.  So many people vacillate over whether they are "pro-life" or "pro-choice," caught in the web of the great American lie: shouldn't women have the right to choose ? Who am I to tell someone how to live?  Allow me to offer a suggestion: it's not impeding upon anyone's rights to insist that killing their child is a bad option. An immoral option. An option which, in the long run (an likely even the short run), they will deeply regret.  How can our ambivalence remain as...

Here is the post I promised at the end of the last one.  What I want to discuss is how do the five points I drew from Romans 1:1-7, relate to youth ministry.  Honestly, I believe they relate to all ministry this way, I simply am going talk in youth ministry terms because that was the initial spur behind me looking into this text. Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace to you an...