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I once heard it said that the greatest mission field in the world is high school hall ways. While I thought this might be true when I heard it in high school, I also thought it was just my pastor trying to get me to bring friends to church. Now I know this is one of the truest statements ever…

"Free to good home—female black Lab, 11 years old." I saw this ad in my company newsletter and it gripped me. "How will these folks ever find a home for an eleven-year-old dog?" I thought. Less than a year before this, our 11-year-old black Lab died. Because we do not plan to stay at our current…

Carmen Luisa Checo Acosta enjoys learning about her denomination as she serves on the denomination's General Board. At those meetings this year, Holiness Today talked to her about her international involvement an local church work. HT: You are now serving your second term as a lay representative…

Brad Daugherty, 16, a Christian student at his neighborhood high school, knows the rigors of living a Christian life in a secular world. "It's hard to get the balance between a Christian worldview and the secular worldview you find in high school," he says. One of Brad's toughest challenges is…

Lorie Orjala Beckum is the daughter of Paul and Mary Orjala, who pioneered the Nazarene work in Haiti. They spent 14 years there before Paul became a professor at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City. The Orjalas also served as missionaries in France, along with Lorie and her husband, Randy…

The news that I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair was a complete surprise. But what I expected even less were the challenges I encountered at church! I was a leader, but I had become one of the "broken," and I found the church unprepared to deal with broken people. As pastor I…

Walking amid the ruins of ancient Ephesus on a hot sunny day in Turkey, I reached down to run my hand over the fluted stone column that lay in the dust at my feet. As my fingers traced the curvature in the stone, I thought about the unknown worker who dressed the massive column in the ancient…

At times in life the fog and opaqueness of ordinary routines lifts, if only momentarily, and our experiences are illuminated with fresh meaning. Such moments can change life in a powerful way. These moments are like the wispy strands of a spider's web—we must grasp them, or they may slip away and…

On September 12, 2012, I made the longest walk of an addict’s life—the walk from the parking lot into my first 12-step recovery meeting. I was 44, and I had a golden calf residing in my heart—alcohol. I was an ordained pastor who knew that God had placed a special calling upon my life but never…

Sometimes, I'll admit up front, I'm bored in church. The songs strike no fire in my heart. A stab at a joke or something funny falls flat. The drama just didn't have it. And the sermon, well, to be honest, I worked on my to-do list through most of it. Not every church service can be a flaming…