This past Sunday, we explored James 2:14-26 together - the famous "faith without works is dead" passage. We talked about the seeming contradiction of, well which is it - faith or works? We took the angle that James was helping to correct an oversight in the early church - that as faith was spreading, some took the idea of being saved by grace as a license to simply continue with their lives without any changes. A true understanding of discipleship understands a changed heart leads to a changed life. We went into a very specific test case, of how to show love to panhandlers (as many of us struggle with what to do in these situations). We landed on the idea of taking action is probably better than no action and providing some sort of gift bag is a great way to show love. - Sermon from 6/27/2021

This past Sunday, we explored James 2:1-13 together, which was about the idea of favoritism. James' audience was bestowing favor among the rich and ignoring the poor - he had some harsh but pastoral wisdom in calling them out on this. We touched upon the subject of racism/prejudice, in that, we all have our blindspots and areas we could grow in. It's easy for us to get stuck in our bubbles, only listening to the voices that make us comfortable and as Christians, we should be able to get out of our tribal mindset and see across the aisle. We ended with a list of small ways to see new ideas around us. - Sermon from 6/20/2021

We continued to look at James 1:19-27 this week, focusing on the idea and the importance of listening well to others. - Sermon from 6/13/2021

I was excited to begin our first sermon series together this week, as we started to dive into the book of James. The basic take-away was that James is all about understanding how to live a wise life and for his audience, they needed help with having wisdom for dealing with persecution, with understanding their social standing before each other, and with how to understand temptations. While religious persecution is not something experienced in modern America, the idea of our needing wisdom for temptations and social standing certainly are for us. There's the very simple call of asking God for wisdom and this is something that will be granted to us! - Sermon from 6/6/2021

This past Sunday we looked at the idea of being made in the image of God, as found in Genesis 1. - Sermon from 5/30/2021