Doylestown Presbyterian Church

Later this month, I reach a professional milestone as I deliver my 1000th sermon.  If you count the homilies I prepared as a seminary student, or my message as a high school senior on Youth Sunday or even the very first sermon I gave to my family in our living room when I was about seven years old (the topic was “Jonah and the Whale”), the total is closer to 1025 lifetime messages. Still, I am using my ordination date as the starting point for this official count. That kind of event got me thinking and led me to pull out my calculator.  If you assume  each of those sermons averaged 15  [ ... ]

This article is printed in the July Tidings. It was an unexpectedly grace-filled moment. Some of you heard the news last month about the perfect game that wasn’t. For those of you who aren’t baseball fans, a perfect game means the pitcher retires all 27 batters of the opposing team without one of them reaching base—no hits, no walks, no errors. It is such a rare event that in the 131-year history of Major League Baseball, there have been only twenty perfect games ever pitched and two of them occurred earlier this season. On June 2, Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga was one out  [ ... ]

This article is printed in the June Tidings. The day after our wonderful ground-breaking ceremony, your Session received the Guaranteed Maximum Price from our contractor, Caldwell, Heckles & Egan. While there are still some adjustments to be made in their number (which would not increase, but lower the price), we are now hopeful that we might add the new sanctuary elevator and possibly chancel renovation to the scope of their work.  We won’t know for sure until we get the final numbers in from our Anniversary Celebration and run one last cash flow analysis, but I am hopeful one or both [ ... ]