Rainey Prays on Some Days

Frank Reitzel is long-time spiritual leader as a pastor for many years and then as a denominational leader in the Assemblies of God for over two decades. But he has been observing spiritual leaders even longer, dating back to his childhood growing up in the home of his pastor father who often hosted evangelists, missionaries, and other ministry leaders, many of whom were extended family members. He wasn’t always impressed by what he saw. And now in his role as a denominational leader, he is often called on to a “crash scene” of spiritual leaders who have gone off course and not only inflicted harm to their own families but also their churches. The Spiritual Leader's Sacred Journey: The Adventure of Becoming The Spiritual Leader God Called You is Reitzel’s response that outlines the calling, priorities, and practices that will result in healthy spiritual leaders, which is the only way congregations can thrive as well. If I were naming the book, I would be tempted to call it The Car...

Below is a family liturgy to use for Thanksgiving Day. It assumes five readers and allows opportunity for all present to offer a single sentence prayer of thanks. Start just before the meal, then continue after the meal. Thanksgiving Day Reader 1: Today is a special day in the life of our nation and in the life of our home. We gather together to give thanks to the Almighty God for the blessings he has granted us and those whom we love. Reader 2: (Prayer). Father, we acknowledge your goodness to us and to all humankind on this Thanksgiving Day. Receive our words of praise to your glory, and bless this food. May it strengthen our bodies and nourish our spirits. Keep us mindful, Lord, of the needs of others, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Meal Reader 3: Read White House Thanksgiving Proclamation 2020 Reader 4: Psalm 118 1 Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever. 2 Let all Israel repeat:“His faithful love endures forever.” 3 Let Aaron’s descendants,...

Screen Recording: Using Twitter to Find Great Kindle Deals I've been doing this for the past several years and have built a great Kindle library of Christian books and theological resources. Enjoy!

Scripture Reading or Story/Illustration When one is preaching and then following the sermon by leading communion, I think it is a good idea to attempt to bridge from the theme of the message to the Lord’s Supper. Otherwise, I like to introduce the Lord’s Supper a couple of different ways. First, one can use a scripture theme such as the Cup of Judgment ( Psalm 75 ) or the Wedding Supper of the Lamb ( Rev. 19:6-9 ). Both of these tie nicely into the Lord’s Supper and introduce some aspect of communion. For example, Psalm 75 identifies God’s judgment as drinking from a cup of wine, which is exactly the picture we get of what Jesus did for us, praying in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Let this cup (of judgment) pass, but not my will but yours be done." In Revelation 19, the Wedding Supper of the Lamb is the ultimate heavenly meal of which the Lord’s Supper is a foretaste. These passages can draw people into the communion experience. A story or illustration can also draw p...

A Quick and Easy Way to Write a Good Church Christmas Musical So it's getting into the fall, maybe even late November, and you know Christmas is coming. Your church has nothing special planned for Advent. What can you do? Why not write a Christmas musical combined with Readers Theater ? I have found this works well and requires minimal rehearsing. Here's how I do it. Pick Five to Eight Songs The first thing I do is search for good Christmas music and select enough songs based on the length of time I have for the musical. I watch You Tube videos of Christmas songs, find out if my favorite artists have made a holiday album, look for movie soundtracks such as The Nativity Story , and check our church's CCLI SongSelect account for Christmas favorites and/or contemporary versions of Christmas songs. After I select the song list, I give them to the worship leader so he can determine if they work for the music team. I have a pretty good ear for music, but don't read mu...

The new year brings with it a renewed opportunity to set goals and do things we’ve always wanted to do but have failed to accomplish in the past. For many people, this also means renewed attempts to practice spiritual disciplines such as Bible reading and prayer. I will leave prayer for another discussion,  but I have found a particular way to read the Bible far more helpful than any other. In this post, I’d like to recommend this method: reading the Bible in chronological order. If you’ve sat down and attempted to read a Bible from beginning to end, you can certainly get a lot of it. But you are likely to also be confused and frustrated because it does not always flow in a chronological or historical sequence. The Bible, if read straight through, actually skips around quite a bit historically. The problem is that it doesn’t really tell you it’s skipping around. You just have to know, or read the introductory article if you’re using a study Bible, to get the historical background...

Idea Tenebrae, a Latin word for “darkness” or “shadows,” is a service that moves from full light in a sanctuary and ends in total darkness, signifying the death of the Light of the World—Jesus—on Good Friday. In this variation incorporating the Seven Sayings of the Cross, the platform becomes more stark and dark as participants depart and extinguish a candle. Preparation Set up seven candles on a Communion table at the center of the sanctuary. Six purple candles should encircle a single white candle in the center. A six-person worship team should serve, one being the lead vocalist, who will sing acapella alone for one stanza at the end. Seven readers should be selected to read one of the seven sayings and pray as indicated below. At opening of the service, a designated person walks down the center aisle and lights the candles. The service can be exclusively focused on tenebrae or added at the end of a more traditional service. Communion is not done in this service. ...

Commentary on Deuteronomy 30 in W. Gunther Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary on page 1545: "Fools attempt to learn the Torah all at once, and when they fail they give up altogether. The wise study a little every day."  A Midrash commenting on Deuteronomy 30.

The General Idea Participants will pray together in small groups in shorter bursts of focused prayer to help them stay focused and not lose interest. When time is up or prayer begins to lag, the leader will have group’s come back together and move them to the next topic. Materials Needed PowerPoint slides or overhead project Set Up Prepare slides with a different prayer focus on each slide and instructions for the group. Instructions You will create 8-10 “prayer slides” to display for 4-6 minute prayer segments. You will divide the congregation into groups of 5-7 people, who will then remain in one location in the sanctuary/room. (This activity also helps those who are in a group together get to know each other better.) Assign a group leader for each group by selecting the person whose was born the farthest away, and then have that person choose someone else to be the leader. The group leader’s job is to make sure the group stays focused and observes time limits. When in...

Introduction Modern technology enables churches to produce bulletins much faster than in the days of typewriters and white out.  Yet I am not so sure the quality is any better.  How can churches continue to produce low-quality bulletins?  It is easy—continue to apply the seven bad habits of highly ineffective church bulletins.  Habit One:  The law of all caps USE ALL CAPS ALL OVER THE BULLETIN.  IT WILL SLOW READING SPEED BY 14-20 PERCENT AND IRRITATE FIRST-TIME VISITORS. Habit Two: The Law of the Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Font Use a small font, preferably smaller than size 10.  This will cause senior saints to shout, but they won’t be saying “Glory!”  Do this only if you intend to issue magnifying glasses with your bulletin. Habit Three: The Law of Centering Center all text. This makes the information harder to read than left-justified text.  Really, you should use centered text only for emphasis and place a box around it....

I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City yesterday with my wife and several of her colleagues from Hawthorne Christian Academy . One exhibit that stood out to me was the Ishtar Gate exhibit , a brick wall that dates to ca. 600 BC in the city of Babylon. The wall has glazed figures of lions and the prophet Daniel would have walked by the walls frequently while living in Babylon. The lions depicted on the walls were associated with the goddess Ishtar, and people could follow the lions on the walls to her temple. Daniel's escape from the lions' den seems to show the powerlessness of Babylonian gods vs. Yahweh, the god of Israel. Nice kitty!

After the lengthy cultic interruption in Exodus 25-31, the narrative resumes in Exodus 32 with the people anxious because Moses has not returned from the mountaintop. This is subtly hinted at in the text, as the Torah commentary notes the transition in Exodus from “the man, Moses” in 11:3 to “this man Moses” in 32:1. People will not wait indefinitely when there is a leadership vacuum. This is why leadership transitions are so critical. Show me a church without a pastor, and I will show you a church at risk. In the absence of viable leadership, people will go back to what they know—to old habits and notions—and in this case the polytheism of Egypt. Despite their grand experience of deliverance under Moses' leadership, his absence up on the mountain with God leaves them vulnerable. It becomes obvious in this episode too that Aaron is certainly not a suitable understudy. Despite making a golden calf, Aaron clings to the notion that the calf represents God's throne. This is the...

Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser lectured at Central Bible College --where I attended as an undergraduate-- around 1990. While there, he spoke on the Old Testament missions mandate and noted that there is no historical record of a spiritual revival in Egypt as predicted at the end of Isaiah 19 . This would be a good time to pray for it to happen.

In 1995, someone found Richard Foster 's book Prayer on a desk at the high school where I was a regular substitute teacher. I was also a pastor in town at the time, so the office assumed it was mine—it wasn’t—and insisted I take it since no one else claimed it. Like many of the books I have acquired over the years, it ended up on a bookshelf in my basement, unread. Over ten years later, I finally decided to start reading Foster’s book at a time when I needed to completely rebuild my spiritual life. When I got the book, the world was very different than it is now. I had never been on the Internet and had no idea what technological innovations were about to be let loose on the world. I grew up under the Cold War threat of nuclear bombs; fortunately, that threat never materialized. But I never suspected how we would soon be bombarded with something seemingly so innocuous and yet potentially so dangerous—information. All of that information is taking its toll as more and more peop...

I'm reading the Daily Office Lectionary readings, a series of daily Bible readings in The Book of Common Prayer , this Advent, and am thinking I'll use it along with the Lectionary next year for my devotional readings. But I felt that I just received a warning in Isaiah 29:13, “their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote.” It seems that churches that use the Lectionary for the Scripture readings in their worship services and use a catechism to teach their confirmees are particularly prone to this rote kind of worship where the heart is detached. This was what Isaiah warns against. I have often thought that Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism , with all of their emphases on the Word, would benefit from using the Lectionary since I have observed that the amount of Scripture read in our worship services is quite paltry compared to Roman Catholic masses, for example. Since they use the lectionary, each mass will have a psalm, Old Testament reading, New Testament ep...

The General Idea For a special Thanksgiving service, set up flipchart stations around the sanctuary. Have a slide projected that instructs parishioners as they enter the sanctuary to think of something or someone they are thankful for and why they are thankful. They should then go write it on a flipchart.   During the service, these will be read. Materials Needed ·   Flipchart stands ·   Flipchart pages ·   Flipchart markers Set Up Set up several “Thanksgiving” stations around the sanctuary with a flipchart stands where people can write on a blank flipchart page. You might want to write something like “I am thankful for . . .” at the top of the page. Also, prior to the service, assign one person per station to monitor the station, make sure the flipchart pages are collected, and that person can then share the responses for their station later during the service. Instructions Either in the five minutes leading up to the service or during a ...

I recently taught through the book, The Prodigal God , by Tim Keller. When teaching chapter five on The True Elder Brother (“My son, everything I have is yours”), I opened by playing the song " Highway Patrolman " by Bruce Springsteen.  The song is about an older brother who is a highway patrolman that frequently bails his younger brother Frankie out of trouble. The song portrays well a moral older brother with a wild living younger brother, expressed with the chorus: Me and Franky laughin' and drinkin' nothin' feels better than blood on blood Takin' turns dancin' with Maria as the band played "Night of the Johnstown Flood" I catch him when he's strayin' like any brother would Man turns his back on his family well he just ain't no good The older brother believes it is a moral obligation to look after family members in a way the elder brother in the biblical story does not, pointing out the need for a "true elder brother" tha...

The General Idea “99-seconds” is a special type of presentation format that features several speakers (usually 10 or more). Each speaker shares a brisk, self-contained testimony or informational presentation that lasts for up to 99 seconds. A 99-second timer will be counting from 99 to 0 on a screen behind the speakers. Set Up and Preparation Must be able to display a timer on a large screen. (The 99-second timer is available for free from http://www.thiagi.com/  or you may use some other software timer). Instructions When providing a special occasion for about 10 or more people in the congregation to speak, have a 99-second timer counting down to zero on the screen behind the speaker. This keeps the person from going too long and provides a fast-paced, energized series of presentations. Tips for This Activity (Organizer) Topics to consider for using this format: Congregational testimonies of God’s work. Missionaries at a missions convention or denominational eve...

       The Bergen Record recently reported another skirmish between a Korean church and a Bergen County community.   This time, it happened in Norwood .   If memory serves me correctly, it has also happened in recent years in Cliffside Park , Englewood Cliffs, Leonia, and Little Ferry.   It usually happens this way: the Korean congregation finds a property or an existing building in a community.   They make plans to convert or expand the property into a church building.   They submit plans to the borough, who then rejects the proposal, suggesting the proposed facility will “negatively affect the character of the borough” ( Norwood ), cause traffic problems, or some other reason.   In response, the Korean congregation cries “racism,” files a lawsuit, and off to court they go.   I personally think this issue is much deeper than one of anti-Korean sentiment.   As one who pastored a church that tried to find a suitable mee...

The General Idea This activity allows participants to share something unique or interesting they have done and lets them see if other people have done the same thing.  Materials Needed 3x5 cards Pens or pencils Instructions   Have participants write on a 3x5 index card, “Have you ever . . . “   Have each person think of something unique or interesting that they have done and have them write it on the card (e.g. “Have you ever . . . been on a trip to Bulgaria?” or . . . met [Famous Person]?”). It should be something they think few people have ever had a chance to do. Collect all of the cards and draw them out and read them one at a time. The person who wrote on the card and anyone else who has done what is listed on the card “confesses” by standing up. This gives people an opportunity to connect with each other who have had similar life experiences and allows people who have done some interesting things in life to share them.