It's my privilege to be a staff member of Harvest Church.
Harvest is an Evangelical Free Church in Story City, Iowa.
Our church is committed to the mission of "Reaching Up" and "Reaching Out" for the cause of Jesus Christ.
As a fellowship, we first seek to reach up to God as we strive to understand Him better through the revelation he provided in the Bible.
The second component of our mission is to reach out. This first involves community as we learn to reach out to one another as fellow-sojourners in the kingdom of Christ. Secondly, it involves reaching out into the world as we seek to aid others through our kindness, character, and doctrine.
The main work area of the website is my blog. Here you will find over 300 posts about the Christian world view and scripture.
You will find other blog authors who are more profound or insightful than I tend to be. (There are links here to some of them.) Nevertheless, the observations in my blog are a modest effort to help readers give consideration to the person and work of Christ and the implications for all of our lives.
Some of the posts deal with questions I am asked from time to time about certain ideas or biblical texts. Others are reflections from events of the day and attempts to step back from the rhetoric of the moment to see how these events reflect the world view of the culture or the Bible.
Before responding to the truth of Christianity, I sought to live justly through self-effort. But even long periods of unselfish, kind behavior could not eradicate the failure that would sometimes show itself as lying, selfishness, indifference, or a host of socially tolerable, but imperfect behaviors and attitudes.
No matter how relatively successful we may be in living 'good' lives, our self-effort can never reconcile us to a perfect God. Unless we redefine his holiness or deceive ourselves about our fallen nature, self-salvation leads only to frustration.
Like a growing number of American adults, I looked at Christianity from the outside rather than the inside. It was something I did not encounter in a personal way during my formative years.
I spent my early years of life completely outside of the organized church. Organized religion was irrelevant in the home in which I grew up. It was not detested. It simply was not important.
In those days, Christian values leaked into the culture more than they do today. But the truths were watered down to the point that I knew little about the teaching and life of Jesus Christ.
In college I encountered some students who actually studied what the Bible taught and who could convey the messages of creation, fall and redemption in a way that made sense. I wasn't interested in church, but I was interested in Jesus' claim to intervene personally with the moral guilt I sometimes wrestled with. His claim to conquer death and speak with authority about the afterlife also intrigued me.
If his claims were true, then I could find answers to the classic questions about the meaning of life, the future beyond death, and the means by which to relate to a personal Creator-God.
I quickly understood that for God to be both loving and just, his character would require him to love me as a being created in his image, yet punish me for my moral rebellion and unholy choices. What was new for me was the realization that God the Father sent Christ to pay my penalty and intervene as my substitute.
By acknowledging my need for this intervention and accepting by faith the significance of what Christ accomplished as he died in my place, I could appropriate this great gift and change my status with God. I accepted what God accomplished for me in Christ and became part of his spiritual family.
Being part of an organized church, much less a leader in one, was the farthest thing from my mind. I was drawn to Christ and what he did for me first and foremost. My own journey reminds me that the church functions best when it points people to the supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus. Too often it points to itself, which is a deadly tactic because it takes the focus off Christ's centrality to the Bible and the Christian life.
I partnered with the church as I began to realize that though it is flawed, it is God's chosen agency to convey the message of the Bible to the world. It is also his means to display a counter-culture that can reflect to some degree the transformation that takes place when people follow him as Lord and Savior.