The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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Clothes Make the Christian

July 31, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Our youngest daughter Carley and her husband Collin just left our house for their new digs in Phoenix.

Arizona.

That’s a long, long way from Midland.

The move is the headline in Collin’s recent promotion with CBS Sports and their 24/7 streaming service. Instead of being headquartered in Dallas and covering college sports and recruiting from Norman to Austin up and down I-35, he’s now part of a team covering almost a third of the country from Arizona and Utah west to Southern California to Washington State. It’s a tremendous opportunity for Collin in a brutally competitive industry–I completely understand–and we’re absolutely thrilled for them both.

Still, obviously, there’s some sadness mixed in. We’re going to see these two much less often now. How do we get one of those credit cards that gives us Southwest Airlines miles?

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In other Stanglin family news, Elliott took his first steps at 6:45 Tuesday evening. At 55 weeks old, our first-born grandson (by 45 seconds) has flipped the switch and doesn’t crawl anymore! If history is an indicator, I’m betting that Sammy watches Elliott bust it for about two weeks, analyzes everything he sees, and then starts walking perfectly, immediately, and never falls. Here’s a video of those first steps:

ElliottFirstSteps

I know! I know! You want to watch it like ten times!

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“As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience… And over all these virtues, put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” ~Colossians 3:12-14

You can tell who people are by the clothes they wear. You see a police officer, you know he’s a police officer by the uniform, the badge, and the handcuffs on his belt. You know a nurse by the scrubs she’s wearing, the stethoscope around her neck, and the bags under her eyes. A referee wears a striped shirt, a cowboy wears pointed boots, a chef wears a funny hat, a dad wears cargo shorts and two-toned Asics.

A Christian is recognized by the fashion statements we make, too. When you’re raised with Christ, you wear compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience, and love And people can see it a mile away.

The old clothes, the clothes you wore in the life you once lived, those are inappropriate for the new realities we enjoy in Christ. The new clothes, the new way to behave–that’s what we wear now. And these new clothes signal to people who we are. They identify us as disciples of our Lord Jesus.

Now, some people will criticize these clothes Christians wear as kind of wimpy. Christians are weak-willed pansies who talk about love and peace and let others just walk all over them.

Wait. That’s not true. Christian behavior is decidedly different from worldly behavior, but it’s not for wusses. People who say that don’t know what they’re talking about.

Have you ever seriously tried to forgive someone who did you wrong? That is a very difficult thing to do. It takes determination and commitment and follow-through. It takes a devotion to another person and a loyalty to higher ideals. It takes great courage to forgive. The wimpy thing, the easy thing to do is NOT forgive.

Have you ever tried to be compassionate and patient? It’s not natural. It’s not easy. It takes tremendous discipline. Being a person of peace in the world we’re in takes a massive amount of courage and boldness. And it’s risky. It’s much safer to join in on all the slander and lies and expressions of outrage.

But those are the old clothes. That’s the old wardrobe, before you were raised with Christ. You wear different clothes now. People know by your kindness, gentleness, patience, and love that you live in a different reality and you serve a different King.

Peace,
Allan

A Social Event

July 28, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I had a fabulous lunch at Mulberry Cafe today with our two amazing GCR youth interns, Matthew and Olivia, two almost-seniors at Lubbock Christian University and two incredibly on-fire servants of our Lord. We talked about their whirlwind summer with our teenagers, horror movies, preaching, weddings, restaurants, the differences between Lubbock and Midland and Amarillo, and Van Halen and Rush and someone named Olivia Dean. I am envious of Matthew’s deep, resonant, bass voice and impressed with Olivia’s ability to just not care about something I’m screaming about. These are two rock-star interns and I hate to see them go back to school next week.

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While preparing for this Sunday’s sermon from Colossians 3, I came across these words from David Garland in the NIV Application Commentary about the social aspect of our salvation from God in Christ. Belonging to Christ means belonging to all those who are also in Christ. Nobody is saved alone.

“Paul gave his life to proclaiming a Gospel that broke down the walls of ancient prejudices. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that we are better than others or more favored by God than others, or that God will skip over us in the judgment because we belong to a chosen people. Our birth, race, gender, language, and social class are not barriers to God’s love, and they should not be allowed to become barriers in the loving fellowship of God’s people. The happenstance of our being born into this world does not cease to exist, but those circumstances should not define what it ultimately means to be human or put any limits on God’s love.”

And this quote from Markus Barth, from a book he wrote in 1968 called “Jews and Gentiles: The Social Character of Justification in Paul.”

“Justification in Christ is not an individual miracle happening to this person or that person, which each person may seek or possess for himself. Rather, justification by grace is a joining together of this and that person, of the near and the far, of the good and the bad, of the high and the low, liberal and fundamentalist. It is a social event. No one is joined to Christ except together with a neighbor.”

I’m reminded again of one of my favorite sentences in the Scriptures, Romans 12:5.

“In Christ, we, who are many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”

Peace,
Allan

Fullness in Christ

July 27, 2026 / / 0 Comments

“You have been given fullness in Christ.” ~Colossians 2:10

The inspired apostle Paul reminds us in the middle of Colossians 2 that God has so fully identified you with Christ Jesus that whatever happens with Jesus also happens with you. By virtue of your baptism and your “faith in the power of God,” when Jesus died, you died with him. When Jesus was raised from the grave, you were raised with him to walk in newness of a brand new and eternal life.

When you are identified so completely with Christ, you cast aside your whole way of life. Your entire sphere of existence changes. In baptism, you have died to the old way of living, the old alliances, the old allegiances, the old powers that used to control you. You died to all that. And you are alive now to God’s new world of complete and total salvation in Jesus.

“Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules?” ~Colossians 2:20

Why are you still living by the world’s rules? Why do you still submit to the world’s principles? Love those who love you. Assert your rights. Get a high-paying job. Vote for this candidate. Drive this kind of car. Live in that zip code. Argue about your opinions. Insist on your way. Buy a bigger TV for your second house. What is that? What are you chasing? What are you looking for? All those things are destined to die. It may appear to be wisdom, it may sound smart, it may feel right–but it’s based on human thinking and worldly principles.

What do you need that you haven’t already been given abundantly in Jesus? You have HIM. You are in HIM. He has already given you everything he will ever demand and everything he could ever give. Why would you look to anyone else? Or anything else?

God made you alive with Christ, Colossians says. You have been given fullness in Christ.

Peace,
Allan

Knit Together in Love

July 22, 2026 / / 0 Comments

“…that they may be encouraged in heart and knit together in love.” ~Colossians 2:2

We spent a good chunk of our sermon time one Sunday last month throwing yarn all over the Golf Course Road Church worship center. There were ten different colors of yarn, representing ten things that eternally connect us together in our church: the grace of God, the blood of Jesus, the love of the Spirit, the mission of the Church, forgiveness of sin, the promises of God, and others. We held onto all that yarn together so we could both experience and express our inseparable bonds with each other, our undeniable connections.

A couple of weeks later we read together from Colossians 2:2 at the end of a completely different sermon, how we are united in love or, as the older translations put it, knit together in love. I mentioned, almost off-handedly, how cool it would be if someone could take all that yarn and knit a blanket to further illustrate our connections. I didn’t know it at the time, but somebody had already done it!

Melinda Henderson had taken a ton of the yarn home with her that day and had set immediately to work. She untangled all the yarn, which took over four hours. Somehow she managed to get Rex involved–I’m not sure if that added to the time it took or shortened it. They sorted the yarn and organized it into a bunch of brightly colored balls, and Melinda made the blanket!

 

 

 

 

It’s not knitting, she told me; it’s crochet. I told the church this past Sunday, when I showed them the blanket, that it’s not playing fast and loose with the Scriptures to say the Greek word in Colossians 2:2 can be translated “crocheted.” We are crocheted together in love!

This blanket is us. This blanket represents every man, woman, and child in our church and all the ways we are connected by the gracious gifts of our God. All the eternal things, the things that truly matter, the things we call salvation things, the things all of us say are the most important things–we have all of them in common.

We need to be reminded of this. We can’t talk about this enough. This is the truth of who we are at GCR that needs to inform our thinking and shape the ways we talk to and treat one another.

Thank you so much to Melinda for her beautiful gift to our congregation! We’ve already figured out how to frame and display the blanket so that everyone in our church sees it all the time. I hope it’s up before school starts. May it continue to be a blessing and a divine reminder that at GCR we are all crocheted together in love.

Peace,
Allan

Holding the Net Together

July 21, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Jesus said he would make us fishers of men, fishers of people. He has sent us out, you and me, to be fishers of “every human.” But you’re not fishing with a pole. You’re not sitting by yourself at the end of a pier with a rod and reel. We’re fishing together with a net. You’re not by yourself holding a stick and a string. We are all holding the net. Together.

It’s a huge net. It’s massive. It’s not the size of a volleyball net, it’s a giant net that spans across generational time and space. And it’s not made of rope or cord; it’s made of Christian seed sown to the Holy Spirit wind.

It’s a song written by Charles Wesley here, a plane assembled by Boeing there, a pie baked by a widow in 1843, an invitation to church written in 1391–God’s Holy Spirit weaves together all these weak and meager threads and it becomes the net. Do you see it?

It’s so big. And it sweeps back and forth across the world. It sweeps across every society and through every culture. The net is drawn in and out through all the decades and centuries. It turns and dips to snag one more soul God is faithfully trying to reach. It speeds up and slows down, it expands and withdraws to catch one more dad, one more teenager, one more generation. While you were sleeping last night, the net was catching souls: maybe a prisoner in Russia, maybe a single mom in Vermont, maybe a cab driver in Tokyo, or a teacher in Nigeria were swept up by the love of Christ.

The mission of the Church is a huge net and you’re holding onto it with us. Your faith and hope and love keep that net moving. Your good deeds for others, the ways you proclaim and share the love and grace of God with your words and acts of service–all of that contributes to our Lord’s salvation net.

The net is floating today by the eternal seeds of the Kingdom sown at GCR by Bert Mercer, Doug Parsons, and Ronnie White. When you serve a meal at Family Promise, when you read to kids at Emerson Elementary, when you write a check for Missions Sunday, when you send a card to your co-worker, when you use blue food coloring and whipped cream at VBS to tell the story of Jesus walking on the water, you are helping to maneuver that massive net.

When you warmly greet a visitor at church on Sunday morning, when you buy lunch for the guy behind you in the drive-thru, when you pray for your neighbor, the Holy Spirit breath of God moves another corner of that net to snare one more lost soul.

Here at our church in Midland, I think about Willie Goudeau and Yvonne Brooks and James and Debbie VanStavern who are still holding that net with Gabby and Kendall and M.J. and Preston. Frances Collins and Wanda McGraw are holding that net; so are Dalton and Hannah Mills, Philip and Caitlin Landry, and Justin and Anna Washburn.

So are you. You’re holding the net. We are, all of us, right now today and forever, connected together by the mission of the Church.

Peace,
Allan

On VBS and Blue Food Coloring

July 20, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Vacation Bible School has become my favorite annual event at our Golf Course Road Church. It’s predictably chaotic and crazy, understandably loud and messy, always a lot of very hard work, and SOOO consistently encouraging and uplifting,

 

 

 

 

 

We were blessed by our God with almost 200 children in our building four nights last week–more than half of them are not members of our congregation–singing and dancing, learning and growing, playing and praying as we talked about what God is doing in and through our Lord Jesus. Davy Wavy the Shark made his typical appearances, delighting both young and old as he bungled through the memory verses each night. Tracey and Kayla led us in powerful worship. The youth group did an outstanding job in the gym organizing the games and showing the littles how it’s done. Judy and Peg killed it with the crafts that made each night’s Bible story come to life. Bailey and her expert snack crew somehow managed to turn those tables over every time without missing a beat or a kid’s allergy. Ryan and Alicia expertly coordinated the children as they packed boxes and bags for Mission Agape and Family Promise. Tracey and Kristin and Ashlee, of course, did their remarkable work in planning and organizing and leading us through every minute. And our God was there every single night, just like he promised, transforming all of us, inspiring us, drawing us closer together and making us more like him.

 

 

 

 

 

Whitney, Addie, and I were assigned to lead one of the 4th and 5th grade groups. We were the Green Knights, the cool kids in the back. We were the ones starting all the chants as we marched from station to station, extolling our own virtues, praising the snacks, and proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus. We said coloring with crayons was beneath us, and then fought over the colors we wanted. We packed double the boxes and bags at the Mission Station. We laughed at Davy Wavy and made fun of Doctor Tentacles, the “villain” who made his GCR debut Tuesday. And we took care of each other, we used our manners, and we learned more about how Jesus really is The Way.

 

 

 

 

 

We also learned that it only takes a tiny amount of blue food coloring to do the job. One little squirt can turn a fist-sized mound of whipped cream into a stormy sea on which Jesus and Peter, played by two Teddy Grahams, walk. AND permanently stain everyone’s teeth, tongues, and lips.

 

 

 

 

 

We learned that running the 4th and 5th graders all around the gym for 20-minutes and then moving them directly into the least-ventilated room in our church building for 20-minutes of crafts is not a good order of rotation. That room still smells like a JV-football locker room after summer two-a-days.

And we learned that Mr. Mark likes to sprinkle old TV and movie references into his stage show: “Daaaavy Waaaavy! Come out to plaaaaay-aaaaaay” Brilliant.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s what I love the most about VBS at GCR. I love watching those who have been at GCR for a long time and those who just got here in the past couple of years or months working together for four hard nights. I love watching our people get to know each other and start to love each other while they’re serving together. One really cool thing about VBS is that everybody there really wants to be there; nobody is there against their will. So everyone is smiling while they serve; everyone is laughing while they worship; everyone is positive and seeing the good in what God is doing all around us. And rejoicing in it. Together.

VBS at GCR is such a great joy, such a wonderful blessing from our God. If you are one of the dozens of folks who made last week around here so great, you have my most sincere gratitude and admiration. Thank you. The work you do for these Kingdom Kids matters today and generationally and for all eternity.

I can’t wait for next year. And I’m glad we’re not doing it next week.

Peace,
Allan

 

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