For the past few weeks on Sunday mornings, and with a couple more to come, I have been bringing messages about the epic battle between good and evil. The big question, “How do we learn to discern between the two?”
Last Friday night I was eyeing my swollen and throbbing finger in some frustration. A painful wasp sting had just put a crimp in the plans for the evening.
The Rev. John McLarty, founding pastor at Faith United Methodist Church, believes God provides people with different jobs. “It was not about me or any individual person; it is about what God does through us and what God will continue to do through the church in the future,” McLarty said.
The first woman bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Vashti Murphy McKenzie, will visit St. James AME Church in Denton as part of a districtwide tour.
In response to last week’s column about setting aside the phrase, “God protected me” when surviving a natural or human-made disaster, a reader wrote: “Do you have any ideas about what I could say when someone tells me a miracle story like, 'God saved me but all my neighbors were blown away?’”
In a recent news article about the role faith and churches are playing in the aftermath of the deadly tornadoes in Granbury, one resident stated that his last-minute decision to take his wife and children to church that night saved their lives, as their home was destroyed 30 minutes later. He said, “That proves right there that going to church can literally save your life.”
Churches are known as a safe haven for many reasons, but what do people do when that haven becomes part of a crime scene?
Three Cooper Creek community sites are set to receive state historical markers Sunday. With the markers, the Cooper Creek Baptist Church, Cooper Creek Cemetery and Cooper Creek School will be honored as pillars of the early community and protected because of their significance to the history of Denton County.
Faith kept him alive after his fighter jet was shot down over Bosnia in 1995, Scott O’Grady told a Denton group last week.
The Church of Corinth’s lead pastor has been placed on leave after his recent arrest, according to the church.
An area pastor posted bail after spending hours behind bars on a sex-related charge Wednesday night.
Periodically, I like to tease my Facebook friends with something new to worry about. Things like microscopic bugs in our eyebrows, the probability or possibility of a really large meteor hitting the Earth, and the rise of mosquito-borne dengue fever to rival West Nile and malaria as world health scourges periodically show up on my Facebook page. I would certainly hate for someone to have a worry- and anxiety-free day, after all.
To tell us about your event or meeting, visit www.DentonRC.com and click on “Let Us Know” for our online forms; e-mail to drc@dentonrc.com ; fax to 940-566-6888; or mail to Page 2 Calendar, Denton Record-Chronicle, 314 E. Hickory St., Denton, TX 76201.
Many of us hold beliefs in an afterlife of some sort. However, we have significant disagreement in how we think that afterlife will work as we hold mutually contradictory descriptions.
What a waste. Twice a year, a large team of people head to the Texas Youth Correctional facility in Corsicana. There they lose three days and spend a huge amount of money feeding, caring for, speaking with and offering grace and love to some of the incorrigible adolescent males incarcerated there.
Nick Bilton, young “guru” on the digital age, offered a recent rant in The New York Times about excess text messages, especially ones that say things like “thank you.”Bilton hates wasting even one extra minute on any communication medium that does not serve his immediate purpose.
In a speedy conclave, Catholic cardinals on Wednesday elected Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina as the first Jesuit pope and the first from the Americas.
Can the morally twisted still recognize and support that which is good? I ask that in light of the upcoming papal election. Now, the former archbishop of Edinburgh, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, has mercifully solved that dilemma for himself.
On Wednesday afternoons, I spend the 40 most enjoyable minutes and also the 40 most exhausting minutes of my week. That’s when I work with a group of teens who are interested in developing their worship leadership skills. I teach them to read Scripture with good understanding of the text, to lead the congregation in prayer, to handle themselves in front of a group, to breathe properly, and especially to recognize how important their presence and ministry is to the life of the congregation.
After serving as pastor for 25 years at St. Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church in Denton, the Rev. Lloyd Pullam retired last month. Pullam, whose new title is pastor emeritus, has been declining in health since suffering a stroke three years ago.
If every day were Christmas, we’d all be miserable. We’d be stuffed, bored, broke and fractious. Irritations would win the day, and gloom and unfulfilled expectations would slather everyone with despondency.
With both horror and fascination, I just finished reading Lawrence Wright’s expose, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief.
Beep, beep, beep. The dreaded alarm awakens high school senior Alex Martino at 5 in the morning. Alex has awakened before the crack of dawn to attend an early morning Scripture study. She does this five days a week at 6 a.m., along with about 160 other high school teens in Denton, Aubrey, Decatur, Gainesville and other surrounding areas.
How do you address the suffering that seems to surround us? And especially, how would you address it to a group of people who are convinced that until they attain a certain state of righteousness, they are doomed to endless cycles of being born, suffering, dying and then being born again, dying, suffering, etc.?
Periodically I need to remind myself of just how unimportant I am. A phrase I’ve heard recently, “We’re just a speck on a speck on a speck,” helps me consider my own insignificance.
We need therapy. We need deep, freedom-giving healing. Why? Well, let’s take a quick look at a few current situations.
Dreams really do come true. Just ask Denton resident Morgan Taylor, 21, who departed for Africa on Thursday to embark on a four-week journey to assist orphans in remote villages in Uganda. “Last April [2011] I had a dream I was a dance teacher in a Third World country,” Taylor said.
Mark Graham grew up in First Christian Church of Denton. He attended the University of North Texas College of Music, where he earned a degree in piano performance. After graduation, Graham followed his professional music career to New York City, where he was a piano accompanist on Broadway.
Dear Friendly: Was Jesus really born on Dec. 25? All these songs about snow and cold and shepherds sleeping outside in the fields in icy winter don’t make sense to me.
Dear Christmas Advice-Giver: Why are some of the religious Christmas carols so sad when this is the season of happiness?
St. Andrew Presbyterian Church members sang in unison at the beginning of their morning worship services Sunday, sharing a harmony founded 150 years ago.
I love Christmas music. The great hymns and classical pieces fill my soul and some of the other lighter pieces add a nice touch of frivolity to the season. But I have one major gripe. A few days ago, I was idly listening to some Christmas music on TV while halfway engaged in another task.
Above all, do no harm. The idea of “doing no harm” underlies many important service traditions. The Hippocratic Oath, often taken by students upon graduating from medical school, reads in part: “I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.”
