When I think of our requests we make of God, I find my own requests break down into a few categories - Personal needs, Family concerns, Parish concerns, and Hopes and Fears.
But one of the blessings of being Orthodox is that the wise prayers preserved in the Faith cause my prayers to ever expand to…
Fr. Barnabas Powell
Welcome to the second day of the Dormition Fast! The wisdom of the fasting disciplines of the Church are meant to reinforce the reality that unless the faith is holistically practiced, that is it affects every aspect of your person, the real danger of compartmentalization exists! I know this is a constant temptation for me!…
Everybody else was squirming. They were obviously having a hard time with the information and seemed to rather have been elsewhere. But I was at peace. It just made sense to me, I guess.
Some of you know the story of how I entered the Orthodox Church. I was a pastor of a growing Pentecostal church…
Alexandre Solzhenitsyn once said "We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap." I wish I had learned this earlier in my life. I would have avoided some painful idolatries.
But we humans are slow learners. And over and over again we come to the end of what we thought we could not live without…
It seems we humans have an ingrained "love"of fighting, defending ourselves, and drama. We are really good at it. Just look at the conflicts that are raging today in our world. We seem to love to fight, and that, in itself, should be a sign of a deep brokenness in us. Our impulse to fight,…
There's just no substitute for contemplation. But it seems our modern world is moving at such a break neck speed that contemplation is impossible! That's why authentic faith is the "last, true, rebellion" and the hardest and most rewarding path to being truly human!
Listen to what Abba Evagrius says "A wandering mind is made stable…
For years I batted around words like "faith" and "believe" with such frequency and then discovered that I really wasn't sure what these words meant! Imagine my surprise while, as a pastor, and a graduate with a degree in Pastoral Theology that I had to humbly admit, I didn't really get these words at all.…
"Did you hear..." That's the beginning of a moment that rarely turns out good! And that's because this is usually the beginning of a conversation that is more gossip than true. But we do love to gossip, don't we? Unfortunately, there are real consequences to spreading stories, especially when those stories are either untrue or,…
It's just who I am. I remember my time at an Evangelical Protestant school for my undergraduate degree, and the 2 years of homiletical classes (how to give a sermon). It was a bit gruelling and my professor was particularly tough on me. One day, I was walking with another seminarian and he overheard our…
There is a story about a great man. He had searched the world over for wisdom. He had gone to gurus, and sought out great religious leaders and learned philosophers. But still his heart ached for more. Sure, he learned great and awesome ideas, and heard wonderful words, but still he felt empty from the…