Sturtz Stuff

 I grew up going to church. That is not the experience of everyone. I have also learned that growing up going to church doesn’t make me better than anyone. Yet growing up there was never a question about where my family would be and what we would be doing on Sunday mornings. Unless I had a fever you would find me at church. Growing up in and around church I have been to plenty of VBS programs, youth conferences and Sunday morning services. I have enjoyed my fair share of church potluck dinners, Christmas eve services and listened to some wonder messages from the Bible. While I believe that the church is the continuation of Jesus’ ministry the church also involves human beings. Anything that involves human beings has the sad tendency to do harm while thinking they are doing good. I was told as a kid/teen that the church/Christians were supposed to be different then the world/culture. What I have come to discover is that often the church and Christians are truly not that different...

Your twenty-year-old self can look back at your fifteen-year-old self and think . . . what an idiot! You were worried about all the wrong things and an overall jerk. And your twenty-five-year-old self can look back on your twenty-year-old self and think . . . what an idiot! You were worried about all the wrong things and an over all jerk. And so on and so on to where you are now. Point is we’re all idiots! Worried about all the wrong things and kind of an overall jerk. This couldn’t be truer when it comes to how a large amount of people view the church in America. Don’t get me wrong there are thousands of stories of how churches and individual Christians have done great things for their communities and lives have been changed. At the same time there are way too many stories of how churches and individual Christians have often been worried about the wrong things and were kind of an overall jerk. Being a follower of Jesus means admitting that you and I are in the position of a lear...

My Dad had some quirky sayings that he was known for. One of them was “Well, what did ya learn?” He typically said that after I did something that was way south of smart. Like attempting, at age 10, to play in the family car . . . and taking it out of park . . . and the car rolling down the driveway into some healthy sized holly bushes. If it were not for the holly bushes the car would have rolled right into the side of our neighbor’s home. And did I mention that my little sister was in the backseat. You might imagine my parent’s reaction and part of it included my Dad asking, “Well, what did ya learn?” I would like to think that I have learned a lot from the mistakes that I have made in life. Maybe. Sometimes. What I am wondering, at this particular moment, as I look back over the past year, is “Well, what did ya learn?”. The year 2020 will go down as one of, it not the, worst year ever. I suppose that is saying a lot considering that people lived through feudalism, the Black Plague...

The year 2020 wasn't so great for a lot of reasons. Yet I did manage to read some good stuff during the year. Here is my little list of books that I read and found enriching, challenging and helpful. They are not all the books and articles that I read but they are the ones that I felt like sharing. Here they are in no particular order.  In September of 2019 my good friend Jerl Joslin suddenly passed from this life into the next. Jerl served several Christian Churches in Oklahoma. The majority of his life was spent preaching, teaching and encouraging fellow ministers and their families. In 2014 Jerl and his wife Dani started a new ministry called Refresh Ministry. Refresh Ministry seeks to refresh and encourage local ministers. Jerl drove countless miles across Oklahoma touching base with local ministers to be a trusted listening ear, someone who would pray for them and be an overall source of encouragement. It is the encouragement part that is often so lacking in the lives of loca...

In Jesus' day shepherding was not the noble occupation it had once been during the days of Patriarchs. In a mostly agricultural economic system these folks were grazers. And grazing isn't good if you're trying to grow crops. Shepherds existed at the bottom of the social ladder right next to tax collectors and dung sweepers. Yet they were among the first to be told that a new King was being born. Not the socially connected. Not the politically powerful. What good news it must have been for those shepherds. Someone cares. Someone thinks that we aren’t disgusting. And not just someone . . . God.  God has visited us and given us something precious. God has announced good news. Good because it is redeeming, restoring and refreshing. News because something actually happened.  It is no surprise then that Jesus quotes from the book of Isaiah in Luke 4 “to proclaim good news to the poor.” And by poor Isaiah and Jesus don’t mean some kind of nebulous spiritually poor. They mean the p...

Summarized here is the quandary. Our culture and much of our daily living is done with little to no sense of the transcendent (God). This is the working out of the thoughts and ideas that came out of the Enlightenment and the Reformation. As Charles Taylor highlights in his book The Secular Age we have gone from an enchanted world to a disenchanted one. In a disenchanted world the vertical connection to the transcendent (God) has collapsed onto our horizontal daily life.  The implications of this means that the way to please God/have a good life is found mostly in the political pursuits of justice and peace. Many of the squabbles that liberals and conservatives get into centering on peace and justice touch on five areas: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity (see Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind ). Conservative type folks will appeal to all five areas, especially authority, while liberal type folks will appeal mostly...

I decided to do some checking for myself into the issue of if the US voting system has serious issues with fraudulent ballots. It would seem to me that, after seeking out reliable information, that the US does not have a serious issue with fraudulent ballots (including mail-in ballots.) Among other resources that I checked here are two that offer trustworthy information. The Brennan Center  The Brennan Center is a non-partisan think tank. Tons of solid information that points to a voter system (mail-in or in-person) that is: 1. Able to detect fraudulent ballots well (mail-in or in-person) and 2. Has almost non-existent issues with fraudulent ballots. Click here - the link will take you to a PDF that has multiple links to reliable studies and reports.  Washington Post A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cas...