Friendship, Listening, and Empathy: A Prayer GuideDraw Near: A Lenten Devotional Two Hands: Grief and Gratitude in the Christian LifeSabbath Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest Fasting: Spiritual Freedom Beyond our AppetitesA Renewed SpiritualityNurturing Hope: Christian Pastoral Care in the Twenty-First CenturyThe Power of ListeningJoy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your CongregationPrayers of the New TestamentPrayers of the Old TestamentPersonality Type in CongregationsSabbathA Garden of Living Water: Stories of Self-Discovery and Spiritual GrowthDead Sea: A NovelDeadly Murmurs: A NovelDeath in Dunedin: A NovelBeating Burnout in CongregationsReaching Out in a Networked WorldEmbracing MidlifeFriendingAdvent Devotional

Worshipping God the Creator: voluntary simplicity in action

Lynne Baab • Wednesday July 20 2016

Worshipping God the Creator: voluntary simplicity in action

Some years ago we offered at class at our church on the book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, by Ronald Sider. In the 1997 revision of the book, Sider makes many connections between world poverty and environmental degradation, because it is usually the poor who suffer the most ill effects from the impact of pollution. About six months after the class, one woman who had attended told me about the great impact the class had on her.

Before reading the book, she had no idea of the extent of world poverty or its connection to pollution. After the class, she...

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Worshipping God the Creator: voluntary simplicity

Lynne Baab • Thursday July 14 2016

Worshipping God the Creator: voluntary simplicity

As we slow down to experience the joy of this moment in this particular place in God’s creation, we understand more deeply God’s call to be careful stewards of all that God made. Part of that stewardship needs to be a reevaluation of the way we live in our consumer society.

Day and night the beauty of nature speaks to us of God’s greatness and calls us to praise and prayer. Day and night our consumer culture is also speaking to us, but the message is very different.

“More is better.” “If you are feeling sad, discouraged, or sexually unattractive, you will feel...

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Worshipping God the Creator: Creation care

Lynne Baab • Tuesday July 5 2016

Worshipping God the Creator: Creation care

I majored in biology in college. Some of my most intense worship experiences occurred in biology lab looking through a microscope at algae’s glowing green complex structures or the diverse shapes of bacteria. For my last two years of college, I worked as a lab assistant for an astronomy professor, and I loved learning about the vastness of interstellar space. The hugeness of the universe and the smallness of tiny biological structures spoke to me of the greatness of God the Creator. I had then, and I still have today, a deep reverence for the creation as God’s handiwork. It seemed...

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Worshipping God the Creator: The good creation

Lynne Baab • Wednesday June 29 2016

Worshipping God the Creator: The good creation

The heavens and the earth were created by God. At the end of each day of creation, God looked at what he had made and declared it “good.” The description of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis is one of the most beautiful pieces of literature ever written, emphasizing God’s power to create and the wonder and beauty of his work in creation.

Ron Sider, in a sermon entitled “Tending the Garden without Worshipping It,” argues that the Bible teaches that the "material world is so good that the one who created all things and pronounced them very good actually...

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