Sermon Archives

community
February 25, 2018

Wild Dignity

This week our community made the national news. Floods, water in our houses and businesses… Mess… Distress…for ourselves and our neighbors. We look for a caring community…people who will lift sandbags and help us deal with the muddy situations in life. This week meals have been shared and visits have been made, and we celebrate […]

September 25, 2016

Treasures in Christ

Some years ago…. Judy Wendt….wanting to teach us a spiritual discipline introduced us to the method of pulling out key phrases from the Bible. She began with Ephesians chapters 1-3 and the phrase “in Christ”. She was a wise woman for as young mothers she knew we would be strengthened in our role if we […]

January 24, 2016

Do not Fear; only Believe

In what feels like another lifetime, I preached on the story of the hemorrhaging woman. Looking back on what I recall of what I said, I’ve done my share of cringing. I was a summer student pastor, having finished one year of seminary. In a moment of compassionate insight this week for my younger self, […]

September 20, 2015

Community is Center of our Lives

Erin Lane is the author of the book, Lessons in Belonging from a Church-Going Commitment Phobe, which she describes as a book for “people who like the idea of church but feel disillusioned by the reality of the people who make it up.” (p. 15) Early on in the book she re-tells this story: “A […]

May 24, 2015

Pursuing Peace, Living Hope

There are so many stories and events from around the world that can leave us feeling hopeless and discouraged. These stories, which we hear and see on the news and internet, which we read in the papers, are all about what’s wrong in the world, where the latest natural disaster has happened, how many casualties […]

April 19, 2015

What Kind of House?

What Kind of House?

This is the last sermon in our series on membership, mutual accountability and belonging. The Spiritual Leadership Team began having conversations about membership last fall, and this worship series grew out of those conversations. Since you may not remember the first 2 sermons, let me just re-cap briefly what they were about. You can go […]

September 14, 2014

Blessed and Sent

With this sermon, we begin our narrative lectionary. The narrative lectionary follows the overarching Biblical story of God and God’s people. Preaching from this lectionary will hopefully give all of us a sense of how God has been at work throughout history and of how the story of God and God’s people continues today. Our […]

May 25, 2014

Children of God, Members of One Body

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be the church lately. Perhaps it’s because there are denomination-wide discussions on what it means to be the church together, even when we disagree; perhaps it’s related to the fact that I’m currently enrolled in an AMBS online course on Anabaptist polity–the structures we have […]

May 11, 2014

That Some Would be Pastors

I thought I would start by introducing myself for those who may not know me. I’m from Iowa, went to a private college in Iowa before coming to Associated Mennonite (now Anabaptist Mennonite) Biblical Seminary in Elkhart where I met and married my wife, Missy Kauffman Schrock – who, now works for AMBS. Since seminary […]

March 23, 2014

Boundaries, Buckets and Blessings

The Jews and Samaritans had been estranged for a long time. It all started when those who had been in exile and those who had not been in exile, couldn’t agree on where the temple should be. Initially, it was a mild estrangement, but around 200 BCE, it grew in intensity. It ended with the […]

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