The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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Category: Golf Course Road Church (Page 1 of 28)

Working for Christ

August 5, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Once again, our GCR Church hosted all the new Midland School District employees this week for their two-day orientation. Almost 400 new teachers, bus drivers, counselors, coaches, nurses, and aides spent all day yesterday and today getting the lowdown on how to do their jobs the Midland ISD way. And it was a tremendous success. Again.

 

 

 

 

 

I am so thankful for the more than 30 GCR members who showed up both mornings to greet all the new school district employees, to serve coffee and tea, to point folks to the registration tables, to direct them to the restrooms, and to usher them to the Worship Center, the gym, and Room 301. It’s so much fun when our church recognizes that our building is a ministry hub seven days a week. I have to guess at least half of these 400 new teachers have just moved to Midland from out of town–they’re brand new here–and now they’ve all been inside our building and have had a good experience with some of our best and nicest people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know what God will do with that. I remember Jimmy Morgette walking through our doors two years ago as the new choir director at Bowie, and now he and Logan have made GCR their home. And our whole church is better for it. God is at work both in us and through us when we host the MISD new employee orientation. May his name be praised.

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“Obey your earthly masters in everything and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for people, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” ~Colossians 3:22-24

Disclaimer: The relationships between employers and employees in our democratic society today is so different from what it was with masters and slaves during the first century when Paul penned his letter to the church in Colosse, it’s hard to make even one correlation. We certainly can’t do a one-to-one comparison in which slaves equal employees and masters equal employers. That is not the point of this post. The point is the mutual submission the Bible commands, which is definitely applicable in all our workplaces. 

When you’re at work, someone is either over you or you are over somebody else. Most of the time, it’s both. There’s a leadership structure, a chain of command. There are power and control dynamics in every workplace. So, the biblical principles apply: Don’t just work hard when they’re looking, but work hard to honor the Lord. Whatever you do, do it as working for the Lord.

I love how the cosmic realities of a new life in Christ, being raised with Christ and being a new person, all under the Lordship of Jesus totally transforms the workplace. No matter what your job is–“whatever you do”–you are working for the Lord. No matter what you do for a living, submitting to Christ as Lord of your life turns your job into his holy calling.

Your job is not just a necessary evil to make money. It’s not like you just work to pay the bills and your service to Christ is somewhere else, like what you do through the church. You were created to do everyday work for the Lord. When God created Adam and Eve, he put them in the garden to work it. When you are raised with Christ, you are living a new life in his glory, and you work your job in that same glory. God uses what you do, whatever you do, to benefit others. The Bible wants you to see your work this way and to view everybody’s jobs this way–as work that is commissioned by the Lord and used by him to bring glory to God.

Martin Luther wrote:

“When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. And he does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meal.”

Today, we could say the truck driver who hauled the produce, the factory workers in the food processing plants, the warehouse workers, the wholesale distributors, the stock boys in the grocery store, and the teenager at the checkout counter. You’ve also got bankers and investors and advertisers and agricultural scientists and mechanical engineers, and they’re all playing important roles in your getting your morning bagel. Or the bag of donut holes. It depends on if we’re talking about you or me.

God could give us what we need every day by his own direct provision. He’s done it before. Several times. It would be cool for pot roast and green beans to just fall from the sky, or for ravens to show up on my front porch with cheeseburgers and fries and spicy ketchup. But the Lord has chosen to work through human beings. And we’ve all got different capacities and different talents and different jobs, but we’re serving each other. And our Lord.

Scripture is calling you to re-think your job. “It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” What you do every day, and the way you choose to do it, blesses people and glorifies God. It’s much bigger and much more important than just the task in front of you. Or whether or not your boss is watching.

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

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

 

Summer Break

June 22, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Just a note in between long summer trips to let you know that I’m still here.

Back in the day I used to post something here every single day, even when I was on a mission trip or on vacation. I don’t do that anymore. I returned late Thursday from a wildly successful GCR mission trip to Campo Grande, Brazil and Carrie-Anne and I are leaving this morning for a ten day vacation to Hawaii. The timing of our summer travel is less than ideal–I got home with just enough time to do all my laundry, re-pack, preach a sermon, and hook it to Flower Mound. We spent the night last night with our youngest daughter, Carley, and she’s taking us to DFW this morning. I probably won’t post here again until July 5.

For a brief re-cap of our trip to SerCris, you could watch the first five minutes of yesterday’s sermon at GCR. You can find it here. The video clip of those students lifting Ryan Gernentz into the air is well worth the trouble of a couple of clicks. And, yes, watching Brazil play their first World Cup match at a watch party with 40 Brazilians in Brazil was a once-in-a-lifetime treat. Crazy!

I will return to my normal writing/posting schedule when I return.

Peace,
Allan

 

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