1st Blog Assignment
Ok, here’s my first blog post…and not just for this class, but ever. If you are wondering why that is, the url of my blog should help.
Anyway, I guess I should actually do the blog post, which is supposed to be about my church/denominational experience, not my disdain for property and academic laws…..so back to work.
I grew up in two small towns – Brownwood and Goldthwaite, Texas. Both cities were incredibly similar, which I guess I should have expected considering they were only 30 miles from each other. My parents were and are Southern Baptists to the “t”. They raised my brother and I in an atmosphere where the Bible was the inerrant word of God, drinking alcohol was pseudo-evil if not deserving of the full wrath of God, and abortion/feminist issues were a non-issue (and by non-issue, I mean we didn’t talk about them).
Over the years, I began to question what I’d been taught and just couldn’t qualify what had been indoctrinated in me and where my heart was leading me. So, I began to study and learn on my own and found that there were other people who felt the same way I did. During college, I worked for a number of different churches. I worked for a Methodist church, a Episcopalian church, several Baptist churches, a non-denominational church, Baptist camps, etc. Through this process I learned a great deal about how denominational politics play out in various types of churches and came to understand more why people consider us to be in a post-denominational world (not that we are in Texas, but you get the point).
Currently, I am the Student Minister at the Fellowship of San Antonio. We are a church with strong Baptist ties; however, we have very little ties to Baptist organizations. We do this because denominational politics have forced a great number of people to abandon denominations in the area in which we minister. So, we couldn’t very well call ourselves “North Side Baptist” or something, because many of the people in our church are ex-Catholics or ex-protestants of many different denominations. At our church, I minister to teenagers and recently I’ve begun ministering to college-aged students and young, single adults. I have been in the church for almost 4 years now and I greatly enjoy it. I have a B.A. in Christian Religious Education from Howard Payne University and I am liscensed as a Youth Minister from the First Baptist Church of Goldthwaite, Texas.
After I graduate from Truett Seminary, I plan to just continue doing what I’m doing. The church I am at is currently looking at taking me full-time when I graduate (hopefully in May), and I really don’t plan on changing a thing. I love working with teens, and I plan on being a youth minister as long as I am capable of doing it or until God calls me elsewhere.
This course can best serve me by enabling me to further understand the prophets, so I can appropriately teach them to the students at my church. Oh, and giving me an “A” would also be a great way for the class to help me out.
Well, that’s pretty much it.
Filed by intellectualpropertyontheinternet at August 28th, 2009 under Uncategorized