David Brooks in a recent column in the NY Times talks about a community in South Carolina that brings together as many people in their area that have an impact on child’s life in order to find ways to improve their development. The idea seems to have merit to me, as Brooks points out, there…
A New Season
I have felt for several years, in fact before my trials with cancer, that my time as Pastor of the church we had felt God called us to start was to come to an end. But I had also felt, partly because of how we started the church, that Dorinda and I shouldn’t leave our…
The Irony of Christian Self-Promotion
A few years ago while driving through Yakima, Washington I came across a large building on the corner of an intersection that had painted on the side of the building “The world-wide headquarters” of a certain evangelist whose name was spelled in letters approximately 10 feet high. At the bottom was written in letters almost…
Lawn Bowling in Victoria
One of the reasons I renamed the blog, “The Eclectic Christian” is because I’m curious about a lot of things. On our vacation to Victoria, B.C. a few weeks ago (primarily to visit Butchart Gardens) Dorinda and I were determined to find the Lawn Bowling club we had found by chance on a visit several…
Values Clarification
What is values clarification? In the summer of 1980 while in Basic Training in the US Air Force I was exposed to a lot of new things, almost all of which stand out vividly in my memory. One of the most unusual of the things introduced to me was through the Chaplains in a class…
A new blog title- The Eclectic Christian
As I’ve considered restarting my blog I realized the title doesn’t really capture what I will include in the blog. I’ve used Simply Jesus for various things over the years and it usually captures what I’m about but I realized that it also misrepresents what I want to do with this site. Ultimately I…
FOMO- and maybe the wrong fear
Most of us have been there. Coming off the weekend that was…ok…and fairly restful…but not especially exciting, when a quick check of social media blasts a friends post “That was the best weekend in my life! Oh I wish it had never come to an end…” We do our best to “like” it and maybe…
A new dawn to the blog
I write this mostly to myself at this point since I haven’t posted for a long time and even when I posted my readers could be counted on one hand. I have wanted to write more on the blog but I have a bit of “Niggle” in me (for you Tolkien aficionados)….in other words I…
The Bible as Love Letter?
“God is so in love with you that he wrote a love letter to express that love.” Ever hear or read that statement, or perhaps a version of it? For quite a few years now a concept has spread in the evangelical Christian community and even other Christian traditions including some Roman Catholic ministries, that…
Growing up is hard to do
If you’re around my generation you probably remember that Neil Sedaka popularized a song years ago called “Breaking up is hard to do”. Well as true as that statement might be, and personally I wouldn’t know since I married the only girlfriend I ever had, its not nearly as hard as growing up. I would…
The Eclectic Christian 