UIndy Student Lenten Devotional 2015

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I’m glad to offer a free devotional created by the students and for the students of McCleary Chapel Ministries at the University of Indianapolis. I hope that you too will enjoy taking the Lenten journey with them. I’m so proud of these students, their love for Jesus Christ, and their heart to share that love with others.

Here is the PDF download: UIndy Lenten Devotional 2015

A little about the creators of it: Aaron Taylor is our Chapel Steward of Devotion this year. He is the primary editor. Aaron is a Religion major from Franklin, IN, preparing for ordained ministry in the Presbyterian Church (USA). The rest of the authors are Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians, Evangelicals, Baptists, and lots of other kinds of Christians. They are studying a variety of fields at UIndy including Social Work, Art, Physical Therapy, Nursing, Education, Philosophy, Religion, and many others.

You can print and distribute as many copies as you would like. We ask that you not redistribute electronically (just point them to this site!) or use the text that belongs to these authors without attribution. Otherwise, we’d be thrilled if you share it far and wide.

Last Year’s Devotional can be found here: UIndy Lenten Devotional 2014

One Young Woman’s Efforts to Help Trafficking Victims

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Katie MehrlichOne of the greatest joys of pastoral ministry is seeing the amazing ways that people respond to God’s move in their lives. We have a committed group of students working to raise awareness about human trafficking and to fight back against the injustice. Katie Mehrlich is a sophomore student leader in that organization. She is also insanely talented as a worship leader and song writer, and she leads a Bible study on campus for other students through CRU. I asked her recently to tell people about what she is doing now to make a difference for trafficking victims.

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“Don’t Hold on to Me”: Finding Gratitude in a Time of Transition

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This sermon was from the last service of McCleary Chapel last year. As students prepared to transition out of university life, feelings ranged from joy and hope for the future to grief for the friends that they would leave. I suggested that they could learn a lot from the exchange between Mary Magdalene and Jesus after the resurrection. (The sermon is only about 20 minutes long, the end of the video wasn’t edited properly.)

How I Became an Advocate for Women in Ministry

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IMG_2636.JPGI didn’t grow up in a church community. So when I became a Christian at 18 years old, I had no idea that some people thought women shouldn’t be in church leadership. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed that men held an overwhelming number of pastoral positions. I just assumed it was a leftover from a previous generation’s culture.

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When Blogging Becomes Sinful

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imageMaybe I am becoming the negative and divisive person that I so dislike as representative of Christianity. It seems like there is an occasion every couple months that Mark Driscoll infuriates me to an inch of losing my Christianity. It happened again this week- and he isn’t even active in the blogosphere right now- as some folks uncovered some heinous things he said 14 years ago. I suppose that he has become something of a punching bag for me as he rants ridiculously and his blogging group of neo-peep followers applaud him for it.

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Palestinians are People: A Missionary’s Observations

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Photo: Tarek

As of today, 197 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,500 have been injured in Israel’s constant bombing of Gaza over the last 10 days. Though Palestinians have fired lots of rockets and mortars at Israel in this same time frame, reportedly only one Israeli has been killed. This outburst of violence is the worst in five years. This is a guest post written by an American friend of mine that is a missionary to the West Bank. I asked her to give advice to all of us for whom this conflict is just a bunch of numbers: 197. 1,500. I hope this reminds us that each of those numbers is a person made in the image of God.

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The Most Important Action for Pro-Life Christians: Foster and Adopt

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A picture of my family on my son's adoption day.

A picture of my family on my son’s adoption day.

When my wife and I decided to have a child in 2011, we decided to foster parent as a response to a calling. There are more … ahem … “natural” ways to have children and we certainly considered that path. But we knew that we had the capacity and the life situation to consider adoption through the foster care system and that is what we did. We believed then as we do now, that fostering and adoption are faithful responses to the Christian calling to care for orphans. [Read more…]