This winter we decided to re-visit Sunday School to bring you some of the New Testament Stories that those who were brought up in a traditional Sunday School learned as children.  So we’ve taken to the flannelgraph to tell you the stories of how Mary and Joseph lost Jesus in Jerusalem when he was twelve,…

This is week five of our Old School Sunday School series.  Each week we’ve been re-telling some of the great bible stories from the New Testament, and so we’ve discovered new insights from the story of Jesus’ parents losing him when he was a kid, about Jesus being baptized, healing the blind man and being…

For ten years starting in 1968 Christian Life Magazine published a list compiled by Elmer Towns, who was a Sunday School Guru, listing the top 100 Sunday Schools in America.    In 1974 the largest Sunday School in the US and assumedly in the world was First Baptist Church in Hammond Indiana with an average…

This is week three of Old School Sunday School.  And we sometimes think of Sunday School as a fairly recent phenomena, something that became a part of our churches in the fifties, when the parents of the boomers were filling churches with their growing families.  But the first Sunday schools were set up in the…

This is week two of our Old School Sunday School series.  We tried this last year and had so much fun with the Old Testament Stories that we decided to bring it back for an encore. Sunday School isn’t a big deal in most churches these days, it’s been rebranded as Jr. Church and instead…

So, where were you when you lost your kid?  Seriously, if you have children you’ve lost one at some point or another. And if you haven’t lost one yet you will.  Maybe it was in a grocery store, or on a street, at Disney Land or perhaps at church.  But you remember the moment when…

So, who got stuff for Christmas?  Who gave stuff for Christmas?  Was it good stuff?  I wonder where the stuff will be a year from now?   Christmas is often called the season of giving, and people all over the world give one another gifts, even if they don’t agree with or believe in what Christmas…

If you think of Grace at all at Christmas it probably relates to the short prayer that you will say over the dead bird at Christmas Dinner and you probably wouldn’t necessarily think of Amazing Grace as a Christmas song but you can’t really celebrate the Christmas Story without seeing Grace written all through it.…

Have you ever heard the phrase “The Magic of Christmas”?  Probably, if you google that phrase you get almost 29,000,000 hits.  Everything ranging from albums of Christmas music to campaigns to provide toys to underprivileged children, to children’s books, to more inspirational plaques than you can count.  It was Norman Vincent Peale who wrote “Christmas…

Have you noticed that every year people seem more intent on secularizing Christmas?   They wish you a “Happy Holiday” or “Seasons Greetings” they have presentations at school that make no mention of the manger or the Wise Men let alone the Christ Child.  Now I may be a little overly sensitive but somehow I think…