Weekend Wrap Up

This was a wonderful weekend worthy of recollection! I was afforded the privilege of traveling to Oklahoma City, to participate in their 65th Annual Simultaneous Revival, hosted by the BMA of Oklahoma City, where the president is the Sr Pastor of Fairview Baptist Church, Rev. Dr. John A. (Pop) Reed.

It was a tremendous blessing for me and my life has been bettered to hear from some of the greatest seasoned preaching minds of our day, such as, Dr.L.K. Curry from Chicago and Dr. Wallace Hartsfield from Kansas City. The fellowship was rich among the clergy and I have met many new friends. I also had the pleasure to meet my blogging brother Pastor Tony Rhone in person. It was great to hear his voice instead of just reading his thoughts!

I was humbled and honored to be invited to preach at the Greater Mt. Olive Baptist Church, where Dr. A. Glynn Woodberry is the Sr. Pastor. I want to thank Pastor Ray Owens for opening this door! I'm eternally grateful to him. Greater Mt. Olive is a HOUSE!! I understand why some of the members call it the "Metro-plex". Not only does it have a state of the art sanctuary and plenty class space. It is equipped with a fellowship hall and a full gymnasium! Also located on the campus is a Senior Village, which consist of about 50 duplex units. Pastor Woodberry is doing a great work and Greater Mt. Olive Church serves as a testimony to what a pastor led people can accomplish!

I failed to mention, but did not want to overlook the tremendous preaching ability of Pastor Woodberry! He is truly one of the best and most gifted preachers that this country has to offer.

I am normally nervous about any preaching assignment, but this time, I was flat out scared! This past Lord's Day was Youth Sunday. G M O has a great youth choir under the direction of fellow blogger Rev. K.D. Moss. They sang beautifully, even though Rev. Moss tried to convince me that most of them were not there. i was shaking as I did not want to flop in front of God and this great sea of humanity. I know God would forgive me, but not sure about the others.

I preached a message from 1 Samuel 17:31-45, entitled, "How to Handle your Giants". This is a message I had preached before and it was the one I was directed to preach that day. Words cannot begin to describe how the preaching moment went! Like my son says, "IT WAS OFF THE HIZZLE FOR SHIZZLE MY NIZZLE" The people were both receptive and responsive to the preached Word and we all rejoiced at the close of the message as we remembered how God has moved some Giants out of our way!!! This was a preaching moment that will forever be etched on the walls of my mind! I want to thank Dr. Woodberry again for allowing me to come!

Now on this week, I will be going back and forth to Gary this week for their Simultaneous Revival. I cannot get enough good preaching! Also I want my blog family to be in prayer for my grandfather who is in the hospital. Gotta go, it's time for me to do what I do everyday and try and take over the world for Jesus Christ! Be Blessed.

Weekend Wrap Up

This has been a weekend worth remembering! It started off with the IMA "7 Last Sayings of Christ" . This worship experience was held at the Greater Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. I must say that this was one of the best 7 last sayings services that I have attended. We were blessed with the presence of 32 local pastors and preachers in attendance. I also heard from many that this was the most well attended service of this kind that they had experienced in our area. God is really blessing us in the IMA and I am extremely humbled to be able to serve in any capacity. God Be Praised!!

We were blessed by sermons from: Pastor Barney Lewis (New Peter's Rock MBC), Pastor Timothy Rouse (First AME Zion), Pastor Rickardo Taylor (Mt Carmel MBC), Pastor Ray Owens (Macedonia MBC) and yours truly. We were also blessed by Rev. Barrett Berry (Assoc. Min. Pentecostal Cathedral COGIC) and Rev. Derick Buggs (Assoc. Min. BBC) . Let me say that all of these preachers did a marvelous job! I was honored to be in such a great lineup.

I was also privileged to preach on WUBU, a local radio station which has a Sunday Morning show called, "Michiana Talks", hosted by Vivian Sallie. This was a new experience for me, but all in all I believe it went well.

At BBC, we do not have traditional Morning Worship on Easter Morning. We allow our young people to have their "Easter Program", during 11:00 am service. This has proved to be a blessing not only to our young people, but to family and friends as well. We have some very talented kids at BBC, and they were really on display this past Lord's Day. I was so proud of them. We are taking steps to engage our youth more at BBC. I am excited because we are actually beginning the first ever Youth Sunday at BBC. These will take place on 5th Sundays for right now. My vision is to give them a Sunday every month. Hopefully this will turn into our youth playing a more integral part of Morning Worship, as I believe that public worship is for all who attend.

Pray for me this week as I make preparations to travel to Oklahoma City, OK, to do what God has called me to do! Join in with me as we take over the world for Jesus Christ!!

Sunday Summary

We had a wonderful day of public worship at BBC this Lord's Day! Our Day started off with our Early Morning Prayer Meeting. For the month of April, our Deacons and Trustees are providing leadership in prayer meeting. the topic for today was forgiveness. Our hearts were lifted as the people poured out their hearts to God about desiring to be more forgiving toward others. Thank God for the power of prayer!

Morning Worship started off a little differently this morning. Instead of the Deacons leading devotion, the Mothers and Deaconess carried on in their stead. This took several of our members back to their southern roots as it was a tradition for the Mothers and Deaconess to lead the devotional service on 1st Sunday in the south. This was welcomed and warmly received by the congregation as the praises of God went up!

We were blessed in song by our Mass Choir as they lifted the Savior up for all men to see! I approached the preaching moment with great expectation. My prayer for the week was that the people of God would be both receptive and responsive to the preaching. I continued in our series entitled, "No more drama". Today's message came from James 3:1-12. The message was entitled, "Tempering the tongue". Here's the basic outline:

To temper the tongue, you must;

1. Tame its ability to influence (1-5a)

2. Terminate its ability to impair (5b-8)

3. Train its ability to inspire (9-12)

God really blessed the exposition and presentation of this passage! The power of speech is one of the greatest powers God has given us. With the tongue, man can praise God, pray, preach the Word, and lead the lost to Christ. But with that same tongue he can ruin a person’s reputation or break a person's heart. The ability to speak words is the ability to influence others and accomplish tremendous tasks; and yet we take this ability for granted. I pray that this message was well received and the people would respond by using the gift of speech to edify, equip, encourage, and enlighten one another as well as evangelize the sinner.

I believe that God was pleased with our offering of public worship on today! Pray for us this week as I have meetings about the Gun Buy Back. We held a press conference that appeared on the news. I am interested to see the response from the community. I'm praying that this one will be more successful and more lives would be saved as a result. In the words of Pinky and the Brain, with some slight variation, "What are we going to do today Brain?" "Same thing we do everyday Pinky. Try to take over the world for Jesus." God Bless!!

Weekly Wrap Up

Greetings Blogging bunch! I will start this post by letting you know that this will probably be a little lengthy, so I apologize in advance. Last week was the annual City Wide Revival put on by I.M.A. . I was excited for 2 reasons, first because I really needed to be preached to and secondly this would be my first event as president of the I.M.A. Our evangelist for the week was, Rev. Dr. James A. Boyd, pastor of the Zion Gate Missionary Baptist Church of Columbus, Mississippi. Dr. Boyd has served as the pastor of this church for almost 44 years! He preached with power and passion each night, challenging both clergy and congregation to live up to our God given potential. He was truly a blessing to the body and I look forward to hearing more from him.

Normally, during the revival, we have noon day services featuring local pastors. However, over the past few years, attendance has been extremely low. Because of the drop off in attendance, we decided to combine the noon day into the night service and allow the local pastors to lecture. This turned out to be a wonderful idea! All the pastors were to lecture from an invitational passage of the bible. I was selected for the lecture on Friday night. The passage I chose was Matthew 11:28-30. It was simply called, "An invitation to rest" Here's the outline:

1. Request (Come unto me)
2. Requirement (All you that labor and are heavy laden)
3. Reward (I will give you rest)
4. Responsibility (Take my yoke upon you and learn of me)
5. Resume (I am meek and lowly in heart)
6. Revelation (You shall find rest unto your soul)
7. Report (My yoke is easy and my burden is light)

God blessed as I did my best to keep this at a lecture! This revival was truly a wonderful experience as Dr. Boyd shared with the pastors and ministers some of the pleasures and pitfalls of pastoring.

After hearing such a great week of preaching, I could not wait to get to the pulpit on Sunday! As always, we started out public worship day with Early Morning Prayer. The topic for the day was being available.. My heart was lifted as the prayers of the saints went forth. It was amazing to see the people of God crying out to Him for them to be available to be used by Him.

The choir truly blessed us and set the tone for worship. I approached the preaching moment with anticipation of something transformitive happening in the lives of the people of God as a result of hearing the Word of God! We continued in our series, "No more drama". The passage for the preaching moment was James 2:1-4. The message was entitled "The problem with partiality" Here's the basic outline:

1. Adverse Contradiction (v.1)

2. Absence of Consideration (v.2-3)

3. Antagonistic Conclusion (v.4)

God blessed the exposition and presentation as we were challenged to not show favoritism. The closing argument was simply this. We are no better then anyone and all of us have what we have, simply because of God's grace! It's not that we've applied ourselves, been good, been careful, made all the right decisions, or even the fact that we are saved, it is simply God' grace!

The IMA started a night worship on 5th Sunday nights at 7pm. This is part of fulfilling the three-fold vision of the IMA: 1. Restoring the Worship 2. Reclaiming our Witness 3. Reconciling the World. Our preacher was Rev. Dwight L Gutridge, pastor of the St. Luke AME Zion church of Gary, Indiana. We were truly blessed as he encouraged us on what to do when your life is a mess. This was a tremendous day of worship and I believe that God was pleased with our offering of public worship!

Pray for us this week as we continue to "Serve the Lord with gladness"!

Sunday Summary

What a day of worship this Lord's Day! I arrived back home yesterday from a wonderful Georgia trip extremely tired. I will admit early that I did not think that today was going to be a good day. It really started off rocky as I overslept for prayer meeting. I really don't like to miss prayer meeting. I pledged to myself that I would do better in the future!

When I arrived at church, I was greeted warmly by the saints at BBC! The saying is true, "There's no place like home!" I was happy to see my church family. Service started for me with a very lively devotion, which really set the tone for morning worship! The choir blessed us with beautiful songs of Zion, which continued to build the worship experience!

I was very excited about preaching in my pulpit on today! I couldn't wait to get back to our series. today we continued in James 1:26-27 ESV, which says, "If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. The message was entitled, "Do you got good religion? Here's the basic outline:

Good Religion involves:

1. Dialogue (26)

2. Duty (27a)

3. Detachment (27b)

This message was well received by the congregation! Praise God for His Word! I really thank God for BBC! God has blessed me to pastor a great church with great people!

My day of public worship concluded with an evening service at the Greater Friendship Missionary Baptist Church here in our city, where the pastor is Rev. Larry W. Davidson. Pastor Davidson is a member at BBC, so I was happy to have been invited to share with him and his congregation. Greater Friendship is a wonderful church with a very powerful youth ministry. We were there to celebrate their Nurses Anniversary.

This was going to be my fifth sermon in as many days and I really didnt know how much I had left. The longer I'm in ministry, the more real the scripture becomes that says,"His strength is made perfect in my weakness". I wanted to encourage the nurses especially and the congregation to continue to serve in spite of obstacles that they may face. I preached a message from Hebrews 12:1-2, entitled, "Being committed to the cause" Here's the basic outline:

To be committed to the cause, you must:

1. Embrace your cross (2a)

2. Erase your contempt (2b)

3. Elevate your condition (2c)

God blessed the message and gave me power to preach it! This has been a great welcome home day for me. I was glad to see family, friends, and have an opportunity to fellowship. I'm exhausted and ready tp rest. Thank God for monday! Pray for me this week! God Bless!