It's been a crazy few months here at St. Matthew. Jason Scheler has ended his tenure here and awaits God's next step for him. We've had Rob Nelson join us as our new pastor and he's being used by God in big ways. In the last six months, I've had this series of calls, 4 in a six month time span. It really does seem that God is on the move, though we can't completely understand what He's doing yet.

Before bringing a new person onto their team, leaders often evaluate the prospect by using "The Three Cs"

The Three Cs are:
1. Character
2. Competence
3. Chemistry

Most leaders will tell you that while all three are important, they are not equal. Competence can change over time with good coaching. Chemistry helps but isn't everything--you can learn to function with bad chemistry. When it comes to character though, it's all or nothing!

This weekend in our messages at St. Matthew, we preached about having an "integrated faith." That is, a faith that is not just a "hat" we wear on Sunday mornings for a while, but a faith that informs and transforms our very person. God's dream for us is that we'd BE people of on-fire, passionate faith and bring our faith into each of the roles we live out (each of the "hats" we wear).

Years that we are called upon to elect a president always make me cringe. That's because election years seem to hold certain dangers for the Church that we fail to take seriously.

If you want to hear an episode of The Six Podcast that also addresses this issue go here.

I'm reading through the book "Real Christianity" by William Wilberforce. In reading tonight, I came across this quote. I thought it was powerful. A quick set up for it though, Wilberforce was talking about how we create a "smaller framework" of our "larger" lives that we reserve for faith, religion, religious things, and religious activities. So here it is. Speaking of what will happen when we partition our lives he says,

A brand new episode of the The Six Podcast is ready for you!

To listen go to The Community Site or subscribe to The Six in the iTunes store.

Enjoy!

This last year at St. Matthew for National Day of Prayer, one of the things we did (in addition to 3 prayer services that day) was have prayer stations set up for private prayer time. At each station the pray-er was to focus on one specific type of prayer for several minutes before moving on to the next station and the next type of prayer. I was blown away by the effect of it on me.

I really had intended on giving more time to BLOGGING on prayer this summer while we journey through the Lord's Prayer in our weekend messages

Good thing there's forgiveness, huh?

But here's something that has kept coming up as it relates to prayer that I've been trying to keep in my prayer life.

leaving more time for silence

Authored by my 5 year old daughter, Ellie. Should speak for itself :)

(you may need to go here to see the full size version)

we're talking about prayer in worship right now in the hopes that we at St. Matt would deepen our prayer lives.

So I think that as I get back into the swing of blogging, I'm gonna share little tidbits about what God is doing in my prayer life. Maybe it will help you as you grow in your own prayer life too.

Disclaimer: I'm not claiming to be some prayer guru... I need to grow in this as much as anyone.