josh vajda

A few months ago I gave in and reactivated my Audible account. I never did all that much with it, just retrieve a freebie. Normally I would listen to all kinds of podcasts, but I find my interests have narrowed over the years. And even though there are more podcasts than ever right now, I still have a hard time finding productions that hit that sweet spot for me. And it’s no wonder: my sweet spot is intellectual history. They’re not exactly lining up for that one. My favorite is Al Mohler’s Thinking in Public, but unfortunately there are only a few episodes released each year. Otherwise I’ve had to…

My posts seem to be getting longer and longer, so I’m going to try and course correct. Part of the reason I committed to doing this every day is because I knew it would force me to fix some of these bad habits. Not that writing long is necessarily bad, but I know I don’t like to read anything terribly long online. Do unto others would seem to apply here. Today I was reminded of some connections I’ve been making lately on the subject of hope. Hope is one of the three “Christian virtues” along with faith and love, and it’s one that I’ve blogged about before here and in…

Last time I began reflecting on our experience visiting nearly a dozen churches in the Grand Rapids area. My intent was to be a gracious guest and not a critical consumer, and just to explore what the family of faith was doing around town and in our neighborhood. In part 1, I reflected on the welcome and the children’s ministry teams—the pillars of hospitality. Today I’ll be looking at the Sunday morning service itself. 3. Music I’m titling this section “music” instead of “worship” because while the music is worship, worship is more than the music. The greeters and childcare workers mentioned last time were worshiping with their acts of…

When we first moved to the Grand Rapids area, we only visited three churches. They were all decent churches, but we were eager to settle in quickly and decided to go with the church that Jenny had been involved in when she was still a high school student. In August, we decided it was time to move on. But this time I didn’t want to jump quickly into the next church. When I was a worship musician in Dallas I had the pleasure of worshiping with a number of churches across the metroplex. After living here for three years, I found myself eager to get out and explore. I wanted…

For most of this week, I have been discussing the question of whether or not God still speaks, with local pastor Jim Samra’s book God Told Me as something of a conversation partner. And you don’t have to be incredibly astute to see that much of what I’ve written has been warnings and cautions. The idea that God would tell you something He didn’t tell anyone else is an incredibly powerful idea. If abused, it could lead to self-delusion or worse—deluding others. When God speaks, nothing else matters. So we had better be very, very sure it’s not anything less than God in the control booth. In this last entry,…