St. Patrick Presbyterian Church, EPC

I was in Destin, Florida some years ago when a Category 1 hurricane was headed our way. We were in a condo, right across from the beach. We had stayed there a few times, as it was owned by a member of our church. It was not an aesthetically beautiful building, but it looked like it would withstand a nuclear bomb. What it lacked in external beauty, it made up for by providing the secure feeling of being in a bunker. The inside was a...

My favorite part of summer? All the extra time I get to spend with my kids! They're always around! 

My least favorite? . . . Look, I love them, but they're always around!

As I was studying our passage this week, Fiona interrupted me, and I didn't respond as I should. In my ideal world, there's no such thing as interruptions. Everything is planned. I know, I've still got some growing to do. Henri Nouwen said, "My whole life I'...

The Gospel of Mark is often called the most dramatic, and this Sunday's flabbergasting episode is no exception. Among a big crowd in a small house in a modest village, Jesus performs not one but two miracles. It would have blown the roof off the place if four audacious guys hadn't already razed it to lower their friend - a crazy story! What we find, though, is more than just a remarkable story. This scene presents a claim to an ete...

I suppose wonder always takes you by surprise. Wonder, being the sort of experience that takes your breath away. It is rational, in that you take it in and process it; but it is more than rational, in that it is emotional and beyond your understanding. It is a mixture of fear, curiosity, and delight—kind of like joy on steroids. It challenges your categories and forces you to ask questions. Often you feel humbled because it feels t...

I'm typing this on a keyboard that can blast opinions to the world with reckless abandon in an instant. With this keyboard I can hide behind a virtuous front and say all the right things about conflicts around the globe. But on this keyboard and online, I'm disembodied, excarnational, placeless, and all my good will is scattered to the four winds with no real effect.

In the internet age, it's pretty common for people to have opi...

Only a couple centuries ago, it would take 7 weeks to cross the Atlantic. Now it takes 7 hours. And yet, we're mad if our plane is delayed 20 minutes. Your plane could get delayed 45 days, and you'd still be faster than our recent ancestors! 

On average, Americans will wait:

- 32 minutes for a doctor's appointment

- 28 minutes in the security line at the airport

- 21 minutes for their wife to get ready

- 13 hours a year on hold for cus...

The word “ordinary,” if it is used at all, usually seems to be used in the pejorative, implying something negative. I bring this up because in our Godspeed series this word seems to resurface often. We referred to “Three miles an hour” as the speed at which God works, and it would seem to be a little below average. “Ordinary means of grace”—isn’t that a little pedestrian? And now, “Ordinary people”. It might seem to some that we ar...

Many of you know I am taking this summer as a sabbatical, in large part to make significant progress on my doctoral dissertation. Maybe you even know that the focus of my work is on C.S. Lewis. What you might be wondering is how all this ties directly to my ministry with St. Patrick. Well, to put it simply, what I love about Lewis is what I love about St. Patrick. 

If you’ve never dug deeper into Lewis’ thought and writing than his...

I have to admit, I am obsessed with speed. I time how fast I can walk, in an attempt to get back to my pre-knee replacement speed. I always time myself. I just bought a new side-by-side, and on the first test run, it would only go 12 miles an hour. I was devastated. I kicked the tires, called it bad names, and then called the dealer to come pick it up. Then I read in the owner’s manual—of course, going too fast to bother with that—...

As we enter a new series this week, we’re going to consider what it means to slow down a bit, to Godspeed. In our zeal for the Kingdom, we often run ahead of the gentle pace of Jesus, or else, we resign to sit the bench and pout. But life with Jesus is a lot like taking a walk with a child. It’s taking the scenic route, with a lot of maddening side quests to consider the lilies. 

When I was first beginning in full time ministry, I ...

A great weekend is before us! Whether you are Christian or not, it is incredibly human to mark days that are significant to us. We celebrate days that are monumental to us, both as individuals and as communities (large and small). Often the celebrations are about people and events that are dear to us like birthdays, anniversaries or deaths. They are reminders of how important these people are to us. Sometimes we set aside days to r...

Tonight, my wife closes her production of Shakespeare’s, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Westminster Academy. It’s been a whirlwind of late nights, spilled paint, and teen tears, to produce a couple of hours of magic that will be almost completely erased by the time we worship together on Sunday. In some ways, it feels like an extravagant waste! All those hours and all that effort for something that happens so gloriously yet so brie...

As Americans, we don’t often think about the fact that it is practically a miracle the United States even exists. As children, we were born into a story of stability and prosperity, the likes of which the world has never seen. As we grew older and read history, we began to wonder that it actually did happen. Thirteen colonies, each with their own ideas of what government should look like, and also vastly different perspectives on s...

I love Steven Pressfield. Years ago, I read his book, Gates of Fire about the Spartans who, with just three hundred men and their battle slaves, held the Gates of Thermopylae against an overwhelming Persian army. Not one man survived, but their sacrifice gave time for Greece to prepare for the coming invasion. Pressfield wrote several other books about antiquity, but later he turned his attention to books on writing, work, art, etc...

One would think that once all the external adversaries are put to rest, things would get easier for the Israelites, but as we see in our text this week (and in other texts throughout the Bible), the real adversary is usually not out there—some external threat—but rather the real threat is internal. I tell people all the time that I sleep with the devil, and I don’t mean Teri! As G. K. Chesterton said years ago in response to a ques...

I love it when I get a passage like this week’s sermon text. Chapter 20 is by far the shortest in 1 Chronicles, (only 8 verses), and we sort of covered the first three last week already! What remains is a sparse rundown of three battles with giants, in what feels at first like a sort of wild side quest to the main narrative. But with some study, I think this little list becomes a hyperlink to a whole area of misunderstood Biblical ...

We are really suspicious of grace these days. And kindness and forgiveness. Maybe in a more civil world these would not be outliers. But then again, people have always had a hard time with grace. Centuries before Jesus came, we see this play out when one king (David) offers an overture of kindness and condolence to the son of an old king who had shown him love when he was an outlaw and outcast.

The son, being aided by his echo cham...

I can still remember the realization that settled on me, as I sat in my study in Greenville, Mississippi, three months after moving my family there to plant a church. I was in a miserable office with no windows in the top floor of a bank building. My second child had just been born, so I was sleep deprived, and it was dawning on me that I had no idea what I was doing. It was not for lack of prayer, I assure you. Church planters are...