By Eddie Pipkin May 7, 2016 If you are like me (and prayers if you are, bless you), you are gloriously driven to strive more. Each success is merely a jumping off point to the next potential success. Each triumph is merely the launching pad for the next triumph. And the successes and triumphs have [...]
By Phil Maynard April 14, 2016 Recently, an Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church with which I have worked sent out a memorandum that clarified how local churches should count “community service hours” self-reported by worship attendees (they use the popular nomenclature, “salty service”). This data collection is part of an ongoing data-driven analysis [...]
By Eddie Pipkin April 8, 2016 I am not much on fashion or decorating, or for that matter much of anything that requires a sense of style (except, mercifully, occasionally where words are concerned). My sense of personal fashion style comes in the varieties of “tuck and untucked,” and my sense of home design is [...]
By Eddie Pipkin April 1, 2016 There has been a surprising amount written lately about the value of ‘switching it up.’ In articles on everything from “how to enhance your mental health” to “how to get the most out of your workout,” a consistent theme has been the need to break up our routine. This [...]
By Eddie Pipkin March 2, 2016 When my wife and I moved last year and were purchasing an older house that was going to involve quite a few projects and updates, I got hooked on a web site called “houzz,” which is full of photos of stylish decorating, DIY projects, and articles and blogs about [...]
By Eddie Pipkin February 25, 2016 January of every year brings a raft of articles about resolutions, goals, and strategies for improving the year ahead. The New York Times published an article on their web site called “15 Ways to Be a Better Person in 2016”, which was actually a collection of some of the [...]
By Eddie Pipkin February 25, 2016 If you have been following the presidential election circus (and it’s kind of impossible to avoid, isn’t it?), then you may have seen an incident with Jeb Bush that went viral a couple of weeks ago. In the video clip, former governor Bush was speaking to a room full [...]
By Phil Maynard January 2, 2016 Pushing aside the debris of discarded wrapping paper and pushing away from the table after one more round of delectable Christmas feasting, I find myself pausing to be grateful for all of the blessings of the past year and how much our team here at EMC3 has accomplished in [...]
By Eddie Pipkin December 21, 2015 Much has been written about the younger generation’s disaffection for the church. They report being disconnected from a tired message, stale programs, and language that isn’t relative to their daily experience. They are unengaged and unenthusiastic, bored with the way we do worship. They can’t relate, and they are [...]
December 11, 2015 By Eddie Pipkin Here we are – all of us in the business of ministry – hurtling non-stop through the busy season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, liturgically referenced as Advent, but colloquially known as Survival Mode. Every ministry has dozens of extra events: special worship, seasonal outreach and mission projects, children and [...]
