https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTJzE4dLNhE By Brother Steve Rankin I think it was Christmas 1987 when Joni gave me a cassette (yes, kids, a cassette) of a guy I’d never heard of. His name was Michael Card, and the album/cassette was called “The Final Word.” I started listening and was quickly taken with Card’s ability to write music that […]
By Brother Matt Henson As a baby, I was diagnosed with asthma. Over the years, there have been times when I battled to find my breath when having an asthma attack. One of the worst attacks I ever had was a time in high school where my ability to walk from the couch to the […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddBDEjWMjKo&t=4s By Brother Tom Albin I grew up in a small Methodist Church in Quinter, Kansas. This was before the merger with the Evangelical United Brethren Church in 1968 that gave birth to The United Methodist Church. In those days we sang a few hymns by John Wesley and many by his younger brother, Charles […]
By Brother Matt Henson My wife and I sang to our children as part of our nighttime ritual. It was interesting to see which songs encouraged them to relax and fall into a sleepy state. There were some songs that stirred them and there were some they would cry when we sang them. There was […]
By Brother Matt Henson As a preacher’s kid, I literally grew up in the church. We would attend Sunday morning worship and Sunday evening worship. For the most part, our Sunday morning worship songs would come from the hymnal, while the Sunday evening songs would incorporate another smaller songbook that included choruses and newer songs […]
By Brother Stephen Rankin When I was a kid in the 1960s, the Methodist churches that my father served as pastor were still having Sunday evening worship. The churches were small, and especially on Sunday evenings, a relative few of the regular congregation—maybe ten or fifteen—came back for the evening service. These times were always […]
By Gary K. Wheeler “Chick” was his nickname. He was my pastor as I grew up in a United Methodist Church in the early 1970s. He had the joy of the Lord, the words of an evangelist, and the heart of a shepherd. My family and I were saved under his leadership, and he introduced […]
By Gary K. Wheeler I grew up in a United Methodist Church that used the 1964 Methodist Hymnal. It had what I thought were all the great hymns of the faith. It wasn’t until orientation week at Asbury College my freshman year that I was introduced to Great is Thy Faithfulness, which became my class […]
By Brother John Davis “Oh Lord, my God When I, in awesome wonder Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.” Earlier this summer I was blessed to be able to drive through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, […]
By Brother Steve Rankin I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day Kirk (not his real name), an outstanding student and classic big man on campus, came to my office to talk to me about something he had done. He had gone to a party to celebrate an award he had won. Contrary to his […]
