'The Greatest Worship Service'

I’m on a lot of email chains, and every so often I open an old one and find a name on the list that should not be there anymore. Nobody removed it. Nobody can quite bring themselves to. My phone is the same. It still has a contact that says Dad, and a dozen voicemails from him,

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Rev. Jonathan Beck
'What Do They Mean'

On Sunday, I stood in front of our congregation holding a brick. Munholland Church turned 90 this month, and our first building went up with St. Joe bricks from an abandoned shipyard in Slidell. Men from the church drove over, loaded them up, and drove them back, and a pastor named Reverend Took, a bricklayer before he ever preached, laid them by hand.

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Rev. Jonathan Beck
You Are In the Credits

The movie ends, the music swells, the screen goes dark, and the first white letters start to climb. Half the theater is already moving. Popcorn tubs get stacked or thrown away as people beeline it to the bathrooms and parking lot. Mary Kay likes to stay and watch the credits all the way through. Gaffer.

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Rev. Jonathan Beck
'The Vital Sign Nobody Checks'

The nurse never asks how you feel about your blood pressure. She wraps the cuff, waits, writes down a number, and moves to the next one. Then the doctor walks in and does the most important thing she will do all day. She looks at today’s numbers next to last year’s. One reading tells her very little. A trend tells her almost everything.

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Rev. Jonathan Beck
'Lost and Found'

Picture the scene in Luke 15 where we see Jesus teaching. Tax collectors and sinners are gathering around to hear Him — not to be lectured at but to hear Him and His message which was different from the Pharisees, who were also there. Off to the side, the Pharisees and teachers of the law are muttering talking about the crowd, dismissing them outright.

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Rev. Jonathan Beck
'The Holiness Of Your Work

Ephesians says God prepared good works for us in advance — but it never says those works have to look churchy to count. Most people quietly sort their week into two piles: the sacred hour on Sunday, and everything else - the errands and meetings and invoices that just have to get done regardless.

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Rev. Jonathan Beck
'No Branch Grows Alone'

A grapevine runs on two separate delivery systems at once, and most people only know about one of them. The xylem pulls water and nutrients up from the roots in a single direction, keeping every branch alive no matter how far it's grown from the trunk. The phloem does something A grapevine runs on two separate delivery systems at once, and most people only know about one of them. The xylem pulls water and nutrients up from the roots in a single direction, keeping every branch alive no matter how far it's grown from the trunk. The phloem does something else: it carries the sugar

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Darlene Brown
'Renewing Your Vows to the King'

A young woman at our church grew up in the pews — baptized as an infant, confirmed as a teenager, present most Sundays without much drama attached to any of it. Then something happened in her that had nothing to do with rules or routine, and about two months ago she stood in front of the congregation to tell us about it.

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Rev. Jonathan Beck
'New Mercy, New Song'

Jeremiah watched Jerusalem burn. The walls were broken, the temple was gone, and everything he had warned his people about for decades had finally arrived. Sitting in that wreckage, he wrote some of the most quoted words in the Old Testament:

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Rev. Jonathan Beck
'Which Gauge Are You Reading?'

In 1954, Air Force flight surgeons ran a now-famous experiment on spatial disorientation. They put pilots in a flight simulator, spun them through banking turns with no window to the outside world, and asked them to trust only their instruments — not their bodies. Every one of them

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Rev. Jonathan Beck