The Goodness of God

In the game of telephone that plays out in John 12, God ends it by speaking directly. As, Peter and James and John in the Transfiguration, now, a whole crowd gets the literal voice from Heaven. And, the story ends with them all getting it! Right? Not so much. One of the struggles that we all run into in a path to belief is a desire to God to hit us over the head with it, and then, still missing it...

Pastor Trey continues his conversation with Rev. Raegan Seaton, Senior Pastor of Montgomery UMC, had the journey that her church is on after a painful church split. What they have found is that by leaning into casting as wide a net as possible, being as inclusive as possible, and making sure that everyone knows that they are welcome, God is opening doors that they never thought possible. Hosted on...

The free gift of God's grace is an incredibly powerful offer. We know that we need to do better, but better always exists just out of reach. With God's grace, we can truly heal. It helps too if we're honest about our need for God's grace. It shows others that they are not alone and truly what God's power can do in their lives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Corinthians seemed to find Paul lacking - not in understanding of God but in the cultural markers of success. They go one step further and question is calling because he just doesn't look right to them. This dangerous logic is something that we keep doing today. We like leaders who make the numbers go up, but the wisdom of God works in way beyond our understanding. What looks foolish to us may...

(Editor's Note: We had a posting issue with the original version of this episode, so here is the corrected version) If you like 123 million of your follow earthlings watched the Kansas City Taylor Swifts defeat some other team, you probably saw an ad for Jesus that centered on "He Gets Us." This is part of a many tens of millions of dollars effort to rebrand Jesus as not a hater. Pastor Trey and P...

Pastor Trey is joined by Rev. Raegan Seaton, Senior Pastor of Montgomery UMC, to share her experience of leading a church after a close vote split the church in two. There certainly have been trials and tribulations, but the core of the Montgomery UMC story is one of hope, of healing, and of what God can do in our midst, when you can only move forward. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mo...

Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily reflect on the editorial in Comment Magazine, "Church, Where Are You?" by Anne Snyder, and how folks feel that the Church has abandoned it's role in uniting and brining depth to existence. Folks are finding it in other places because the human need for those things is part of God's design. The Church is failing at the other part of the divine plan - that the Church wou...

in trying to pull together the totality of the God and humanity story into one 16 chapter letter, Paul sets up Abraham as the example of what righteousness through faith looks like. It wasn't what Abraham did that really counted. Abraham, like us, got counted as righteous (despite not actually being righteous) because he chose to believe that God could do the impossible. For him, God then did the...

The story of Noah's Ark is true if you really think about it. Sure, we love the cute animals. The giraffe's head peaks up above the roof. It's so adorable. We leave out the millions of dead bodies floating the water around the ark. You can read it as history, but that starts to call into question God's goodness. Or, you can read it, way less literally, as a hyperbolic parable about human frailty a...

Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily are joined by the amazing Tod Bolsinger, whose book Canoeing the Mountains has become one of the leading texts to teach pastors to lead effective change. He gives insight into helping congregation cope with change, how to preserve through the change process, and how to face the fact that we are all working in a world that we were never prepared for. We have to lead cha...

No, Christ's transfiguration on a mountain top, long ago, wasn't a sitcom, but like a sitcom, how it plays out should show us how real life plays out. Jesus doesn't stay up there. He doesn't stay all glowed up. Instead, he goes back to looking the way he did and plunges back into the grit of life. The complete grandeur of God suffer alongside us. We too don't stay on mountain tops. We end up in va...

Imagine a world where there is nothing but retirees as far as the eye can see. That's the world of The Villages, the Florida retirement community that is also one of the fastest growing municipalities in the country. The Bubble by filmmaker Valerie Blankenbyl delves into this surreal world and finds what lies at the hurt of the phenomenon: a sense that society has left them behind. While a world f...

Paul didn't have the luxury of massive buildings or cultural cache. Instead, he had to reach people by actually getting to know them, building relationships, and showing them the love of God. In an era, where our own culture cache ain't doing what it used to, maybe, we too should embark on the remarkably simple endeavor of loving people where they are and seeing what God does with it. Hosted on Ac...

All groups develop their own insider language. In technical fields, this can be super useful. Why say the whole thing, when everyone knows what you're talking about? In church, this just makes things even more inaccessible to folks who might not know that they belong. How we talk can play a huge role on whether someone will see us as humans and feel like that can be a part of what God is doing. Ho...

Prophets know God's truth. We are told to head them. We tend to ignore them, and in doing so, get the order of the universe completely out of whack. Prophet don't speak their words. The good ones speak for God, and God should be at the center of everything that we do. In a world absent a singular prophet, we must first choose to follow in all that we do and, then, discern what that actually means....

Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily welcome Dr. Ashley Boggan, General Secretary for the United Methodist General Commission on Archives and History. She's an expert in who the people called Methodist have been in the past and through the rhyming ways of history has a vision for how it can shape who the church can become. She presents a clear thesis. John Wesley chose to be "vile," to go places that he'd...

Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily are joined by Dr. Ashley Boggan, from the United Methodist General Commission on Archives and History to talk about Jonah, our Biblical prophet of fishy fame. Jonah's words shake loose change in Nineveh, but he wants to mad about the whole experience. Accountability can be incredibly important. Nineveh gets changed by it. Jonah wants all that grace from God for himself...

61 years later, Martin Luther King Jr.'s challenge to white clergy still rings true and still stings. It can be all too easy to push away the problems of the world, when those problems don't impact you directly. It can also be difficult to discern the right way to actually make an impact and when is the right time to get run out of town for standing up for what is right. It involves living into a...

Calling gets complicated in the real world. We like the stories of God calling folks in clear, often audible ways. It doesn't work that way for most people. We like to think about how God has a special task for us. It sounds great. It all gets a lot more difficult, when we then need to be faithful to that task. Samuel and Eli show us those complications. A young man needs help to understand his ca...

Karen Swallow Prior, a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote an opinion piece for Religion News Service, comparing organizational and institutional change with romantic relationships. You shouldn't get into a relationship thinking that you're going to change someone. That is great human relationship advice, but does it hold true for how we should approach the Church? Read t...

The story of the Magi (AKA the Three Wisemen, AKA the Three Kings, AKA Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar) matters profoundly because it brings the Gentiles into the fold. Whatever their names were and how ever many of them there were, they set out on a dangerous and uncertain journey to worship a king. They were motivated in the extreme by what they saw. May we all respond the same way. Hosted on Ac...

Anna and Simeon see what God is doing, when it doesn't look like anything at all. Infants are born somewhere in the world every 4-ish seconds. Yet, Simeon and Anna had profound religious experiences encountering the infant Christ. They could see through the unlikely visual to the deeper more profound movement of the Spirit. May we all have the same eyes to see the movement of God in even the most...

A lot of things can never go back to the way that they were, but our relationship with God can. God's grace is more than a simple pardon. It's an opportunity for complete restoration. This sits at the core of who God is - across both the Old and New Testaments. So, this Christmas, we celebrate God's gracious story. Also, as this is the last show of 2023, Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily run down the t...

Sometimes, God changes things all at once. We wait and wait and wait and think nothing will ever change. Then, in an instant, God changes everything. The arrival of Christ is one of those moments. God's people waited for hundreds of years, with no sign of change. Then Christ shows up, and the world shifted on its axis. Also, Pew Research put out a study looking at new ways to talk about spirituali...

God's people arrive back in Jerusalem from exile, and all is not well. The city lies in ruins, and even though they're back, it still fees like God has turned God's back on them. They weren't the first or last group of people to experience this particular kind of disappointment. You think the one thing will make all well, but it doesn't turn out that way. It does work out for them, eventually, but...