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Covid, Science, and Normalcy
Back in the springtime, when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy effectively closed churches but continued to allow liquor stores to operate, many Christians were upset. Why were liquor stores deemed “essential” while churches, parks, beaches, and other large-gathering places were closed? While the governor claimed he was following “the science,” in actuality, science didn’t show that those […]
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Comfort Zones
For more than a century, St. Matthew’s has been like nearly every other traditionally Lutheran Church: in a comfort zone. All of us like what we like and we are comfortable liking it. Nearly every Lutheran Church is the same. This doesn’t make any congregation that is in the comfort zone bad or out of […]
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Office Productivity.
Time for me to vent: Microsoft Office is expensive. Even with a monthly subscription, the cost of using Microsoft’s suite of office productivity tools isn’t cheap. Google’s G-Suite offering provides churches with a less-costly option of office productivity software. Only major issue is that booklet production (read: weekly bulletins) is basically impossible, unless you want […]
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Digital Trail in a Church Office
At times in my ministry the challenges of actually running a church office can be confounding. On the one hand, the actual “running the operations of the church office” is usually left up to the church council with the input from the pastor. The pastor does provide structure; the operations are left to others. I […]
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Supreme Court Religious Bonus
Good news: Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on religious liberty was even better than we thought. The Justices ruled 7-2 that a church could not be banned from a public benefit program merely because it is a church. On Tuesday the Justices extended that principle by overturning a ruling that struck down Col-orado’s school voucher program […]