Confessions of a Seminarian

Dead Man Walking

For Holy Week, my church put on four worship services to illustrate the story of Jesus’ last week on earth. The Wednesday night service was organized by the pastor and church plant leadership team we are preparing for in St. Louis city (Mike and I are on that team). The pastor and the worship leader are incredibly artistic men, and instead of the usual worship-preaching-worship model of service, they crafted several short videos that were interspersed with music played by the “Soul Expedition Band.”

The evening’s theme was “The Sweat of a Son,” telling the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying before he underwent torture and crucifixion. To communicate the stark intensity of this struggle, the video showed some blunt video imagery. Clips from the movie “Dead Man Walking (the scene where Sean Penn’s character is executed by lethal injection) were inserted to help contextualize Jesus’ impending execution. The following short video utilized clips from “The Passion,” with frequent flashes of the previous video, to connect and contextualize Jesus’ prayer in the garden with the struggle of knowing he would be executed.

Now, I explained all this because we’ve received some interesting responses after this worship service. One response in particular was noteworthy. Read more »

Kirkwood Chaos

As some of you may have seen on the news, Kirkwood, MO is dealing with the aftermath of some brutal murders last night at the City Hall.  My wife and I live a few blocks from there, and the other contributors on this blog also live in the general area.  Kirkwood has had a really rough time in the last few years, with another officer killed in the line of duty, and the Michael Devlin case just a year ago.  The community is still in shock.

Here is the story of what happened last night.

Please keep our community in your thoughts and prayers over the coming days, and that the church would be in a position to show the love of Christ to a community in grief.

The Value of Risk in a Risk-Averse Culture

When I was in high school, my Dad encouraged me to pursue a career in financial planning.  I really did like the idea of helping people get out of debt, invest wisely, and build wealth.  But the career I really wanted was in law enforcement.  While my Dad wanted me safely behind a desk from 8-5, I wanted the freedom of keeping the peace in a roaming patrol car at all hours of the night.

I’ve learned over the last several years that I’m a bit of a closet adrenaline junky, and thrive in stressful or risk-inherent environments.  But I’ve also learned that this is not necessarily the norm for our culture.
Read more »