A Noble Theme

And now, folks, here are the results of the final round of voting! Thanks to everyone who participated. Please join us for the sermons you chose in January! These were our previous winners: January 6: How can we learn to forgive others, "as the Lord has forgiven us"? January 13: What do I say to my Atheist friend? (Ammunition for a friendly debate) January 20: Don’t look back cause you’re not going that way 10 votes Where is Eden? (Divine  Geography) 13 votes Have you ever known God?? How do we find him? Where do we find him? 11 votes "Sometimes I wish I could be like a preacher in the movies" 12 votes I think you should preach about what led you to this ministry 42 votes Prove Jesus exists without using the Bible as a Reference 54 votes Why do good things happen to bad people? 18 votes Modern Day Prophecy 19 votes How does God hear...

This coming January I would like you – that’s right you! – to decide the topic of the sermons I will preach. During the month of November, I will be collecting your suggestions of sermon topics. You may post your suggestion right here as a response to this post. Phrase it as a suggestion (“You should preach about ________”) or as a question. If you would rather remain anonymous, you can message me or give it to me at church in an envelope. I am going to ask, however, that you only make a suggestion if you are likely to attend a worship service this January. This is only for people who will participate. During the month of December all of the suggestions will be put to a vote by the congregation (more details on that later) and the top four suggestions will form the sermons in January. Scott McAndless

When asked about how I choose the passages that I preach on, I often say that I gave up on the Lectionary years ago. The lectionary is a three year cycle of Bible passages for reading during Sunday worship. Preachers who use the lectionary generally confine their preaching to one or more of the passages listed for the day. There are a number of reasons  why I gave up. I grew tired of the it. After the first couple of times through the cycle, I certainly found it repetitive. I also have a rather perverse liking for Bible passages that are obscure and often forgotten and would not want to be denied the opportunity to preach on them just because they weren't in the lectionary. But, in many ways, my biggest beef was Advent. The season of Advent is the season immediately before Christmas – starting 4 Sundays before the big day.   My problem with Advent is that the themes of the season in Christian tradition and in the lectionary are all about the end of the world. All of...

Yesterday I was filling out an application for the Pastors of Excellence program (I’ll no doubt write more about that program in the future if I am accepted). The application was surprisingly probing. One of the questions gave me some pause. It asked, “What is your greatest frustration in ministry?” My immediate response was to say that nothing frustrated me more than when people get upset at something that has gone wrong or that hasn’t gone their way in the life of the church and, in response, they withhold something – perhaps their money or their time and talent or, in the worst cases, their entire presence. I do hate that and find it very frustrating. And even if the thing that they are reacting to has nothing to do with me and is nothing that I could have (or should have) made to go differently, I always feel as if it is my fault. I feel personally attacked. So that is the response that I wrote down. But when I went back and looked at it, I knew that I hadn’t really to...

Up until the spring of this year, St. Andrew’s Hespeler had a position called the Creative Ministries Coordinator – a part time position that was very ability filled by Adriana Vermaas for many years. In the spring she resigned and is moving on to other challenges (while continuing to participate in the life of the congregation). What do you do when a position like that is suddenly vacant in the life of a congregation? Generally speaking Christian congregations are not overstaffed. Though there are always concerns about how much the payroll costs, of course, the problem is almost never that there are too many people on staff but rather that there are not enough to do everything that needs to be done. So there is a temptation, as soon as a position like this is vacated, to go ahead and fill it right away because there is a danger that, if we don’t, the congregation will just decide that they can get by without the position and the existing staff will only end up getting stretch...