There are certain questions that I ask myself regularly. Do I really need another cup of coffee? How is my daughter so adorable? And when it comes to planting Checkpoint Church: what's the point? Why are we doing all of this? At the end of the day, what do I hope to have achieved? The irony is that the answer to the question is to make you answer that question for me. Whenever it comes to ministry, few people share a common metric for success (whatever that word even means).

Today marks an important day in the Christian Calendar. Yes, we have one of those. This is the first day of the season of Lent, which leads up 40 days to Holy Week and ultimately Easter, where we celebrate Christ's conquering death. Some of you may have participated in this before, but for some this is a totally foreign concept. Typically, Lent begins on Ash Wednesday (today) and we put burnt ashes of the palm branches from Palm Sunday of the year prior on our foreheads as re

There are many things that I enjoy about being ordained in the United Methodist Church. One of my personal favorite aspects lies in our connection. The UMC is a bit like an umbrella in structure, or perhaps more aptly, like a fisherman's net. Rather than relying on the structure of the local church alone, the UMC is a connection of conferences and charges across the globe. I could say much more about this and likely will in other conversations, but I mention this to bring up

If you haven't been able to join us for the past few weeks on our Twitch stream, we've been playing through the classic Gameboy remake Pokémon FireRed. But not just any playthrough, we've been participating in a Nuzlocke run. What this means is that we apply a certain set of rules on the game to make it more challenging. First rule: permadeath. In normal gameplay, whenever a 'mon is taken to zero hit points, it simply faints and can be revived at the nearest Pokémon Center. I