God Calls Me
I am called to preach the Gospel and faithfully administer the sacraments under the apostolic authority of a bishop of Christ’s Holy Church because God saved a Mormon boy from the pits of despair and freed him from the chains of the law. This God, in securely calling me his own, redirected my heart to serve his one, holy, Catholic Church and to share the truly Good News of unmerited free grace to others lost in darkness. God calls me especially to minister to and establish the Church among those often overlooked and forgotten; the poor, the imprisoned, the foreigner, and the oppressed.
Read more...Automated Weekly Sermon Podcast
Each Sunday at Church of the Epiphany we record our sermon using someone’s mobile phone. We started doing this back in September and, for the last three months, editing and uploading these sermons to our website has been a fairly manual process. Starting this month, however, with a combination of JustCast, Dropbox, Hazel, Squarespace, and Auphonic I’ve been able to mosty automate the process.
1. Download & Rename
Each week shortly after worship, Fr. Justin e-mails me the audio recording of his sermon from his phone. His Android phone defaults to .m4a for audio, so I’ve setup a simple Hazel rule to monitor my download folder for that extension so the file is quickly renamed and moved off to my external archive drive.
Plene Esse, the Holy Spirit, & Intercommunion
This is part three of a four part project. The final project is here.
“For a long time the Conference on Faith and Order shied away from and avoided directly addressing this problem [ecumenical Eucharist]. It was the type of issue so loaded with emotional dynamite, that we feared it might with the first little thrust set off a spark that would explode our entire movement into pieces.” Dr. Leonard Hodgson.1
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Humanity & the Church
Introduction
Humanity and the Church or, to cast them in more theological terms, theological anthropology and ecclesiology, are highly related doctrines that often get overlooked in the Christian theological community. First providing a brief history to setup a framework for theological discourse, I seek to better understand what humanity is in the eyes of and relationship to God and to define what the Church is and is called to be in the world. With a clear framework in place and the doctrines sufficiently defined, I will place Christian anthropology into conversation with ecclesiology and tease out the common theological thread in both sources that lead to a theology of Divine relationship as the true telos of the human creature and the Church.
Read more...The Christology and Ecclesiological Vision of Paul in Philippians and Colossians with a Practical Application for the Modern Church
Introduction
Both the epistles to the Philippians and Colossians pivot on hymns seeped in Paul’s Christology. The hymn in Phil 2:6-11 focuses on the unexpected nature of the Messiah who fulfills the prophesies of the prophets while the hymn in Col 1:15-23 focuses on the divinity of Christ and his preeminent status before all things in heaven and earth. Surrounding the two hymns, Paul’s exhortations for new patterns of life and he and his fellow servants’ Christ-template narratives call the “faithful brothers and sisters in Christ”1 in both Philippi and Colossae to a new way life.
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