Today At Church

Joyce and I have been attending Bayview Baptist Church for a while now. The church had gone through some hard times recently with the church building being destroyed in Typhoon Pongsanwa in December 0f 2002 (they met at a hotel for 4 years - I preached there a few times) and now going through a pastoral transition. For the transition the church brought in a consulting group called Titus Ministries to evaluate the church and help them set up a pastoral search team. This will be about an 18 month process. The interim pastor sent out by Titus Ministries to do the evaluation and serve the congregation is Mike Albin. Mike is a Dallas Seminary graduate (it is nice to have a fellow alum out here!) with a lot of experience. Joyce and I have spent some time chatting with Mike and his wife Judy and we are excited about having him out here as a fellow kingdom worker and to hear his vision for ministry.

Mike has been preaching through the Lord's Prayer the last few weeks in the Sunday service. Today the message was on the petition "do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." All the sermons in the series have been good but I especially appreciated this one. Instead of focusing on the word "temptation," as usually is preached, Mike focused on the main verb "lead" (all my exegesis students take note: grammar matters!). Thus, the emphasis was that our goal is to become Christ followers rather than just "nice, good Christians." Christ followers take Jesus' side, listen to Jesus and are led by Jesus and thus avoid temptation, not the other way around. I appreciated the emphasis and the challenge to get into the battle and encourage others to follow Christ.