About a year ago, a book written by Dan Kimball called How (Not) To Read the Bible came out. When I got the email that this book was coming out, I pre-ordered it and planned to do a teaching series based on it at Madison Church. We talk about the Bible weekly during our gatherings, but […]
Giving Is Good Jesus is known for his profound wisdom and paradigm-breaking teaching. Even 2,000 years after Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, his followers are challenged to live in the ways he has called us. One of those countercultural teachings is found in Acts when he is quoted as saying: “It is more blessed to […]
Winning The Lottery In 1988, a man named William Bud only had $5 in his checking account when he bought some lottery tickets. As fate would have it, Bud won the $16,000,000 jackpot. It’s not hard to imagine how Bud must have felt because we’ve all had $5 to our name at some point and […]
We went to Florida in our old 2012 Ford Escape with 210,000 miles on it last December. All my friends were taking bets if it would break down in Nashville, Atlanta, or Orlando. We made it back, though! We found out that the air conditioner doesn’t work on the way down there, which was a […]
Finding Nemo Have you ever seen the Disney movie Finding Nemo? Finding Nemo came out 20 years ago. That makes you feel old, doesn’t it? For those who haven’t seen the film in two decades, it’s about an overprotective dad clownfish whose son gets taken from him. The dad goes on the adventure of a […]
“Circles” are essential to us at Madison Church. They’re part of our strategy for connecting people with God and each other. We have systems to help people read the Bible daily and pray regularly. We also have a plan for sharing meals with one another. (We literally have “eat together” on our website. I don’t […]
Awkward Family Photos Have you ever looked back at a picture from childhood and wondered how your parents would let you leave the house looking like that? I do. I try to not look back at some of my old school pictures because they are very cringy. Although, to be honest, my parents did try […]
A bunch of years ago, I worked at a bank. When I was being trained, there was this particular form we had to fill out and send in periodically. They taught me to take this piece of paper and roll it into a typewriter and then type into all those little boxes. And I’m like, […]
Genesis was not written to directly answer our modern questions about subjects like evolutionary biology and human sexuality, and yet the creation narrative (Gen 1-2) speaks indirectly to both. Just as most, but not all, animals fit into the classifications of “land,” “sea,” or “air,” most, not all, humans fit into the categories of “male” […]
The first words we read in the Bible are, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). Nowhere in the entire account of creation or in the rest of the biblical texts are we told that God created sin or death. Rather, we find out that these two were brought into […]