Church Voices

I am watching Clifford with my 3 year old and it struck me how relevant the lesson being taught in the show was to church work.  I suppose that many problems we have in the church could be fixed if we were humble and mature enough to admit our immaturity and relearn our Kindergarten lessons.

This particular episode had Emily Elizabeth (Clifford’s owner) and some friends putting on a play for their neighborhood.  One of the friends was the director and began to tell everybody (including the dog stage hands) how to do it “right.”  One of the children was offended and gave up his role in the play because the director seemed to think she could do it better.  Eventually the director took over every job because she could do it better.  She proceeded to practice through the play (enjoying it I might add) until she crashed (literally).  She realized how she hurt her friends and asked them back promising not to interfere.

I’m a perfectionist.  Sort of.  If there is something that I think should be done a particular way (i.e. the right way) then I am inclined to say something and/or take over.  This is not healthy and is not conducive to good friendships.  I’ve had to learn the hard way to not intrude on the work and service of others in the church.  Granted, there are times when something needs to be said or done (not everybody is gifted or skilled in every way).  But for me, it’s usually not being done the way I would do it, and so that would be why I speak up.  I have found that more gets accomplished for the Kingdom of God when I don’t interfere and micromanage the ministries of my brothers and sisters.

Maybe you’ll find God teaching you something valuable in strange places. 

For some reason the old look of this blog was not playing nicely with something else. So for now it’ll be the boring old default wordpress theme. When I get some time I’ll figure out what the problem was.

Everything’s back to normal now.

We got hit with a load of spam lately. I’ve taken steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again and deleted most of what you’d see on any recent comments.

Edit:
Holy crap, if you take a look at the bottom of the page you’ll see that there has been over 500 pieces of spam stopped since I took steps to stop it. Yow.

As you can see there’s been some changes around here. Church Voices has changed servers as well as blogging systems. Everything should be in place, all the audio files and other good stuff is all where it was before.

I’ve installed a lot of anti-spam measures when it comes to comments, we got nailed with it awhile back. If you’re having problems posting comments please contact me either via AIM, my screenname is “churchvoice” (no quotation marks), or via email.

Mike Kupferer will be joining in on the writing soon.

Also, in my time at NHCC I’ve met some incredible people. A lot of them have become Christians in the short time that I’ve known them. Occasionally I”ll be featuring their testimonies as they write them. Hopefully this will be a repeated feature.

As you can see I added some links on the right titled “resources”. Right now there’s a section on apologetics, and a devotion entitled “The Old Testament Strikes Back”. More entries will be added to the devotion as time goes on. Hopefully I’ll also be able to update the apologetics section as well with new teachings and resources.

We’ve also added two more writers. Evan Casey and Todd Jefferson will be contributing in the future. If you’d like more information about them you can go to the Writer Bios.