Today is Heritage Sunday, the day when we commemorate the founding of the United Methodist Church. It was on April 23, 1968 that the United Evangelical Brethren and the Methodist Church came together in a spirit of unity to become one body, united in Wesleyan theology and spirit. On that day we declared these words: “Lord of the Church, we are ( Read more... )

The Day of Pentecost began as a Jewish holiday but has become important in the Christian Church as a memorial to the day when the Holy Spirit was given and the Church was born. Today we focus on what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Who is the Holy Spirit (He is a who and not a what)? How does the Spirit of God relate to God the ( Read more... )

The Ascension of the Lord is a day on the Church calendar that is every bit as important as Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas. Why? Because our belief in the ascension (which we affirm every time we recite the Apostles Creed) is what informs our faith that Jesus Christ is alive today and seated at the right hand of God the Father. We have an ( Read more... )

Maybe you've heard the old adage, "Many hands make light work." It's true that the more people who are involved in work, the easier the work becomes. It's the same way in ministry. In today's concluding message from our series, "What Are You Doing?" we look at our promise to faithfully participate in the ministries of the local church by our ( Read more... )

The very first thing we promise to do as members of the local church is to pray for its ministries, but how many of us truly do that? We as Christians understand the importance of prayer, and yet so few of us spend time daily on our knees praying in the name of Jesus Christ for our local church. We can fully fund our ministries but if we do not ( Read more... )

In the early Church we see an example of how we as Christians ought to respond to the good news that Jesus Christ rescued us from sin and death. It was a natural response for the first Christians to be extremely generous with their resources, because they recognized that they had been given everything by God's hand, and they realized that none of ( Read more... )

You remember our labor and toil, brothers and sisters; we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. - 1 Thessalonians 2:9
When I began the pursuit of answering my call to ministry, I had no idea what a licensed local pastor was. In my mind, I had been called to pastoral ministry, and ( Read more... )

Jesus said that we are salt and light. But what do these things mean to us today? This week, we take an in-depth look at some of Jesus' sayings from the Sermon on the Mount, and also examine what it means to be called to righteousness while living under God's grace. (This message was recorded at Hudson UMC in Pedricktown, NJ on February 9, 2014 ( Read more... )