Life In Your 40s (You Die and then You Live)

The following is audio with images, plain audio, and notes from the teaching given by Leah on February 28, 2016.  Feel free to listen online, download, or read the notes.  This teaching is the fourth in our winter series, "Find Your Calling."

Life in Your 30s (Doing Stuff for God)

The following is audio with images, plain audio, and text from the teaching given by Leah on January 31, 2016.  Feel free to listen online, download, or read.  This teaching is the second in our winter series, "Find Your Calling."

New Year Ponderings

It’s a New Year.  The calendar has turned.  If you’re on social media, likely much of your Facebook or Twitter feed has been devoted in recent weeks to the occasion, with year-end remembrances and best-of the year posts, as well as New Year Resolutions declared (and perhaps already confessed to being broken), and hopes for this year articulated...

Revolution. Seriously.

William Joseph Seymour was an African-American man born in Louisiana in 1870.  His childhood was not an easy one.  His parents, Simon and Phyllis were former slaves.  William was the oldest in a large family that lived in abject poverty.  He grew up in a dangerous time for African-Americans in the south.  The KKK actively terrorized the blacks of southern Louisiana, and violence against them was extremely common.

Why church?

Why church?

Church.  Why church? What is it’s value?  What is it good for?  What’s the point?
These are questions that people of faith living in 2015, especially in extremely secular, liberal, academic, urban settings like Berkeley and the greater Bay Area have to wrestle with.  They are questions ultimately at the heart of what we are doing here today. 

 

Tongues of Fire and Stuff

Tongues of Fire and Stuff

I believe I was a sophomore in college when it happened.  I had only been really following Jesus less than a year at the point when I was invited to attend my first church conference.  The college group I became a part of was loosely affiliated with a Vineyard church, and that church was having a weekend conference.  Attending the church on Sundays, let alone for a whole weekend, made me nervous.  It was so different from the experience I’d had of church growing up that I didn’t know what to do with it. But I trusted the group’s leader, and he told me that this conference was going to be really powerful in terms of people encountering God, so I went.

Unbelievable Stories

Unbelievable Stories

Tony was an eight year old boy when it happened.  His mother and father told him that he was going to be a big brother.  A baby was coming.  For this family, it was an unexpected miracle.  Tony had had numerous health problems as a young child, and for years doctors told his parents they should not try to have any more children.

That Good Old Samaritan

That Good Old Samaritan

Though only 26 years old, Kayla Mueller had long been a humanitarian.  According to her father, she discovered as a young person that her life’s purpose was to ease the suffering of others.  She grew up in a small mountain community in Northern Arizona, but worked to bring awareness to her town of global issues of injustice.  She worked to educate community members about HIV and AIDS, she protested genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and volunteered at the women’s overnight shelter. She traveled to Palestinian territories, Israel, India and France doing humanitarian work.