Now. Here. This.

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Now. Here. This.

Ministry and A.I.

No doubt by now most of you have heard of the new artificial intelligence software, ChatGPT, that we’re told is ushering in a new area of technological innovation not seen since the rise of social media some 15 years ago—yay! ChatGPT is billed as a powerful piece of...

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This Is Who We Are

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”-Lilla Watson, Australian activist, academic, and artist The missional ministries at FBCX are expansive. They...

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Forgiveness Sunday

Among my favorite traditions of the wider church comes on this final Sunday before the start of Lent, which is known as “Forgiveness Sunday” in Eastern Christianity.  Now, the Eastern Church uses a different calendar from us Westerners, so their Forgiveness Sunday is...

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Around the Table

In her sermon last week, Ellen Sechrest of CBF Global Missions spoke to us about the importance of inviting people to the table. Sharing beautiful stories from her childhood and experiences serving on church staffs through the years, she reminded us that this act of...

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Thank You

To all the many people who had a hand in bringing together the celebration of my 10th anniversary, please know how grateful I am. It was, in a word, overwhelming. Anita Gusfason and the personnel committee, Jackie Riley and all those in the kitchen. DeWayne Moore for...

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So much of life

As we prepare ourselves for Thanksgiving and time many of us will spend around a table with loved ones, and when all of us will call upon or be visited by memories of tables and loved ones and Thanksgiving's past, I offer this poem from Joy Harjo on the miracle and...

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The First Step

Over the past two Wednesdays in Bible Study we have looked at a survey of scriptures to see what the Bible has to say about death, dying, and grief. This was on the occasion of All Saints Day, which we celebrated this past Sunday. But we also know that grief does not...

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The Kairos of Things

We track time differently in the church. To start, we use a different calendar than the world around us. Our church year begins with the First Sunday of Advent when the world around us restarts every January 1.  We keep a different set of holidays, or holy-days....

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Master Planning

Amid budget talks and the news of JD’s upcoming departure, it’s possible that we have not made as big a deal of another important piece of business addressed in our quarterly church conference at the end of August: the creation of a new ad hoc committee to produce a...

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The Simple Truth

“Some things you know all your life,” writes the poet, Philip Levine, in his poem, “The Simple Truth.”  “They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the...

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A Future That’s Bigger Than Our Past

In his wonderfully hopeful and challenging book, A Future That’s Bigger Than Our Past, author Sam Wells, the vicar of St. Martin in the Fields Church in London, begins by stating what we all know to be true, which is that the Church is changing. The Church is changing...

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The Poetry of Our Own Lives

The Poetry of Our Own Lives

“Drawing on nothing fancier than the poetry of his own life, let him use words and images that help make the surface of our lives transparent to the truth that lies deep within them, which is the wordless truth of who we are and who God is and the Gospel of our...

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Polychromy

Polychromy

When was the last time you realized you had been looking at something completely wrong? At least at the time I’m writing this (no reason to think it won’t happen again before you read this!), for me it happened earlier today when I read about a new art exhibit at the...

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Time and Momentum

It’s “back to school” season, the time when all of us parents send our children out the door with fresh haircuts and new shoes and say to ourselves and anyone who will listen things like “time is moving so fast!” It turns out this is true in more than just a...

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Where do you like to look?

Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”   ​When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the...

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A People Who Dance

A People Who Dance

This past Sunday we began a worship series focusing on the four words we lift up from our church vision statement that have become something of our mantra or motto: Nurture. Love. Serve. All. In a combined Sunday School class down in the fellowship hall we enjoyed...

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Different Histories, One Community

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in New York on the occasion of Independence Day. While Douglass himself was free, having escaped from slavery years before, slavery was still very much the law of the...

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Scripture of Nature

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to do one of the coolest and hardest things I’ll likely ever do. I joined three other gentlemen from our church—Shaun Kell, Doug Thompson, and Troy Tarpley—in a rim-to-rim run/hike of the Grand Canyon. It’s hard to put into words...

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A Good Day for Macon

This past Thursday, members of our pastoral staff had an opportunity to join 25-30 community leaders for a meeting with Senator John Ossoff at the Tubman Museum for African American Art, History, and Culture. We gathered in the rotunda of the museum (an impressive...

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Our Problem

I was a sophomore in high school when two teenage boys killed 13 students at Columbine High School. I still remember the collective shock that something like that could have happened. It seemed to expose something ugly and deeply disturbing about us as a people, and...

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