Posts by Tim Severance
It may be Friday, but Sunday is Coming
Easter Sunday will be here in a few short days. Christians all over the world will celebrate our Savior’s victory over sin and death. The entire Christian faith is centered on Jesus’ raising from the dead. However, we rarely think of Easter without first being reminded of Good Friday. Of course, there is nothing “good” about it since that’s the day we remember Jesus nailed to the Jewish cross and crucified. There seems to be a theme that emerges from these two events – How COVID has affected us
Your Teen and Social Media
Let’s discuss three areas that can help you as a parent better understand and connect with your teen when it comes to using Social Media. It can be very daunting for some parents when their children know more than they do about the Social media platforms available on the Internet and Smartphones. Here are some tips to help level the playing field. 1. Keep an open dialog with your teen. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. What app are you using? How COVID has affected us
How to Have a Digital Faith
A digital faith? What does that even mean? Well, if you think of a computer or more specifically, a computer language, you can get some insight. When you dumb down a computer language whether it be Perl, C++, Python, Cobol, or whatever, it boils down to bits and bytes. Those bits are are made up of 0’s and 1’s. Like a light switch, they are either on or off, yes or no, true or false. It’s pretty simple. What does that have How COVID has affected us
A Christmas Story Quiz
In October, we shot a Christmas video with children from our Wednesday After School Program (WASP). These are kids in Kindergarten through 2nd grade. We’ll premiere the video at our church’s Christmas Eve program this month. We sat the children down and asked them questions about the Christmas story. Overall, they did quite well recalling the story of the Nativity. However, some of their answers raised an eyebrow. Here is a quiz on the Christmas story based on some of the children’s How COVID has affected us
Boosting Your Faith: 3 Practical Steps
Faith is defined by dictionary.com as “confidence in a person or thing.” When we are talking about the Christian faith, we are putting our faith in God (the person) and the Bible (the thing). Confidence is a term that can be increased or decreased like a thermostat. We can turn a thermostat in our home up to give us more heat. Likewise, if someone turns the thermostat down, the temperature will change accordingly. Placing our confidence in a person or a thing can How COVID has affected us
SPICING IT UP WITH CHANGE
I’ve decided to change the name of my blog. My invisible blog. LOL It was called “Writer’s Block.” It wasn’t easy to find. In fact, when I Google “Writer’s Block” my blog does not come up. Go figure. The term “Writer’s Block” has been circulating for decades so that may have something to do with it. Anyway, the new title of my blog is “Christian Living in the Digital Age.” This is a blog where I write about the Christian faith, How COVID has affected us
Salvation Confusion
If you listen to one preacher give an invitation to “invite Jesus into your life,” he might lead you in a prayer. If you listen to another preacher prodding you to become a Christian, he might be telling you to be baptized. Yet another preacher might tell you to “Believe in your heart” and you will be saved. If these preachers are all Christian, Bible-believing men, then why the confusion? Why are they offering what appears to be conflicting invitations? I’m How COVID has affected us
Exploring ChatGPT from Openai for church
Today I received an article in my email inbox titled, “5 insanely practical ways for churches to use AI.” That is ironic because I was going to try to use the most popular AI, called ChatGPT to write this week’s E-News article. ChatGPT is self-defined as “an AI-powered language model developed by OpenAI, capable of generating human-like text based on context and past conversations.” ChatGPT can literally carry on a conversation with you, teach you a new language, write copy for advertising, summarize an article How COVID has affected us
How Old is the Earth?
This was the question I received to answer on a recent Basecamp panel. The men had been asked to write down questions on 3×5 cards and turn them in. I thought this is a good question to address here as well. If you would have asked a scientist in the 1800s how old the earth was, they would have said between 20 and 400 million years old. This is based on famous Irish physicist and mathematician Lord Calvin’s calculation of how long How COVID has affected us
Ecclesiastical Expectations: What Does the Bible Say?
This is the third article of three regarding church expectations. In my first article, I asked “What do you expect from the church?” In the second article, I wrote to answer the question, “What does your church expect from you?” Let’s look at what the Bible says in regard to church expectations. If you have heard of the phrase, “paradigm shift” then you’ll understand that this is nothing like what my first two posts talked about, but is rather a whole new way How COVID has affected us