Recently while I was watching our baby Samuel, I found myself dancing with him around our kitchen to hymns and songs of praise coming from our Apple HomePod. When we’re not dancing together, Samuel has begun to bounce along to the music in his bouncer suspended from the doorframe. The songs we listen to lately…
When I was younger, my liturgical attention span was mostly limited to Christmas Day and for all the wrong reasons. “Sure, we’re celebrating the birth of Jesus, but let’s get on with opening my presents already!” As a preacher kid, my patience was further tested each year by all of the services that stood between…
The word advent is adopted from the Latin word adventus which can be translated “coming and/or arrival.” As Rev. Joe Carnes Ananias laid out more robustly in the Trinity News a few weeks ago, Advent is a set apart season of the church where the community both celebrates that Christ has come once, in the form of…
Today we enter the season of Advent. We rightly think of this season in the life of the church as a preparation to celebrate Christ’s birth at Christmas, but it is more. Advent is a time of preparation—for Christmas, yes—but ultimately for the last day (Jn. 6:40), when Christ will “descend from heaven with a…
News broke this week that a secret startup led by Bill Gates achieved an incredible breakthrough in solar energy that may enable our most energy-intensive industries to drastically reduce their carbon footprint. It seems every day we find the marker for human achievement advanced further than imaginable. Which raises the question, what are the limits…
I have the privilege of serving as our church’s finance manager for the past 14 years. It has been exciting to be on the front lines observing and accounting for Holy Trinity Anglican’s growth and kingdom impact – the construction of a new church, years of revenue growth, new ministries, more outreach and more staff…
Our opening few weeks of the New City Fellows program focuses on the biblical storyline. One of the reasons we do this is because of how pervasive stories are for humans. As the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt points out, “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”[1] As we invent…
Serving one another is closely related to our identity as Christians. The apostle Paul explains why this is so in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter twelve. He uses the human body as a metaphor for how the church should function, likening the various parts of a body – hand and foot, eye and…
If you add up our work time—hours at work, time tidying up the house, the seemingly endless lawn work, the extended homework sessions, the evenings spent answering work emails—the result for many of us is that the majority of life is spent working. And in work, we often sense that there has to be meaning…
Throughout Scripture, God is described using many different names: God as king (Psalm 95), shepherd (Psalm 23) and warrior (Exodus 15) to name a few. In Psalm 78, we are presented with God as teacher. In the first four verses of this psalm, the psalmist conveys a message of instruction from God to his people,…