Grace Mills River

“Echo chambers,” “safe spaces,” “thought silos”: they speak of a common impulse to retreat into communities of agreement as a refuge in a polarized and hostile culture. But to inhabit those communities is at the same time to think of other...

The psalm that we will consider this week is both a confession of faith as well as a call to “come and see” the works of God. The psalm reminds us that God is our refuge, our source of strength, and a “very present help” during times of trouble. The...

It’s widely held that ours is a more, as it’s called, “secular” age--shorn of its prior attention to the sacred and increasingly, if not exclusively, focused on the tangible, the material. But that sacred-secular distinction is in some ways foreign...

This morning we’ll ordain Ben Seneker to pastoral ministry. What has he committed himself to? What do those entrusted to his care look to him for? For what should they pray on his behalf? How are a pastor and his parish’s responsibility distinct? How...

No one with faith in God is immune to sorrows or despair. Jesus promised we’d have tribulation (John 16:33), but He also said “take heart, for I have overcome the world.” Is that exhortation a call to find your own resilience, or is it an invitation...

It’s an all too prominent feature of Israel’s story that the nation’s trust in God grew cold, which led to the cultivation of ways that in time became impossible to escape. In those moments you hear some within Israel, including the psalmists, asking...

We will look at Jesus’ encounters with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman as windows into how Jesus responds to both our success and failure. This is “Jesus and Your Resume” and “Jesus and Your Rap Sheet.”

We’ve been exploring the Psalms in search of the overarching Story they tell--the Story God is writing and the one His people are wrestling both to understand and live into. But the idea of one grand story (a “meta-narrative” as some like to call it)...

The seeds of reformation had been sown long before Martin Luther published his grievances with the state of the church in October, 1517. But it can be argued the Reformation began in earnest with Luther’s first of 95 Theses: “When our Lord and Master...

The world is ablaze with fierce assertions and defenses of identity. Implicit within those claims is the assumption of a thing we call dignity: an inherent and irrevocable worth each person possesses. Most of the time, though, dignity is assumed...