About Me and This Blog

ABOUT ME:

I am a follower of Jesus, the husband to Alison, father to Ian, a multi-vocational pastor with Williamsburg Christian Church, ethnographer, activist & justice seeker, founder and president of 3e Restoration Inc, Mid-Atlantic Coordinator for Mission Alive, avid reader and coffee drinker. In God’s grace, I was given the honor to serve with WCC in October 2010. I received my B.S. in Ministry/Bible at Amridge University and a Masters of Religious Education in Missional Leadership (MREML) from Rochester College. Currently I am pursuing my Doctorate of Ministry in Contextual Theology at Northern Seminary where I hope to dive deeper into my study of Hospitality as Leadership, Witness and Power and the role of hospitality in congregational renewal. This study is a reflection of my work as a congregational pastor and local activist, and researches how congregational engagement and embrace of the socially displaced can lead a congregation toward missional renewal.

I enjoy hanging out with my family anytime, anywhere. I am deeply grateful for how God graciously works through His Church in all her various forms, despite our brokenness. I am passionate about seeing the last, least, left-out and lost in every neighborhood, city and nation experience God’s in-breaking kingdom, and come to know Jesus as King. My greatest hope is that the Church will continue to experience missional renewal as gospel-centered, kingdom-shaped communities learning to enjoy God and participate in what He is doing in this world as His everyday people, living in everyday places, offering tangible expressions of love, hope and peace in everyday ways. I constantly find myself in need of God’s mercy and grace every day, and is prematurely balding.

In my role as founder and president of 3e Restoration Inc, I work with a great staff and Board of Directors to establish partnerships with other faith communities to encourage, equip, and empower them to walk in relationship with a “Friends/Families in Need” to help them transition from homelessness/extreme poverty to self-sufficiency through community and God’s sufficiency. 3e Restoration Inc works to break the cycle of homelessness and extreme poverty through gracious hospitality and systemic change one friend or family at a time.

ABOUT THIS BLOG:

Whats up with the address http://www.fredsforehead.com?

It is simple, really. I have an abnormally large forehead.

What is up with the name of this blog?

I would answer this in 5 points, but first a caveat: I do not consider myself “a writer.” I write but I am not what some mean when they call themselves “a writer.” So if the grammar, punctuation, run-on sentences that could begin or end with prepositions, or a deep, love, for, commas, bother you, this blog may not be for you. Seriously, I have a love affair with commas. Now onto what this blog is about.

1. Personal Discipline: This is more of a self-discipline process for me. I need a venue to discipline and organize my thoughts. The wheels in my head never stop turning. I try and turn them off but have discovered that it’s just the way God has wired me. So I need to do something with them or they will continue to pile up and run together in incoherency.

2. Conversation Nurtures Learning: I do not mean to simply lay out my thoughts as if I am writing streams of consciousness or else I would journal privately. I want to lay out these thoughts before other thoughtful people in order to learn and refine my own. Hence, the blog and it’s title, “Inside this guys head.”

3. Hope and Truth: I am prisoner of hope. I believe in a world full of wonderfully confusing but meaningful grays that move somewhere in between ideas and ideals that are black and white. Therefore I believe in truth. If I cannot engage truth, I am not sure there can be any sustaining hope. If there is no truth, hope isn’t real. How could there be because “hope” wouldn’t be “true.” I desperately want to deal out hope and engage truth whenever I can. It is the way of my Lord and Teacher, Jesus and as a His follower, I must go in the way He leads. I believe that He is Who He says He is. I believe that what He says is true about life to be real.

4. Skin: In the end, words are just words. But words express thoughts and thoughts. Thoughts give birth to action. Passionate thoughts, girded with truth and wrapped in hope give birth to action that incites movements. Ultimately I want to put skin on my words, if they are worthy of the thoughts they express. If they are not, I would rather discard them all together.

5. Invitation: If you find any of these thoughts worthy of action, I invite you to put skin on them as well.

But please know that my biblical worldview, though always being processed and evaluated with God’s help in various ways, wildly informs this blog. I believe that the Bible is God’s unfolding story of His in-breaking kingdom that tells what He was up to when He created this world, why we are here, why this world is in the shape that it’s in, what He is doing in it, where He is ultimately taking it all, how we can get in on what He is doing, and that His self-revelation and engagement with His world can be trusted.  So I do not believe that any word I have to offer can outdo, outshine, or outlast what I believe to be Holy Scripture commonly referred to as the Bible (and by the way, I mean both Testaments).

One last thing: I write with a guiding ethic. That ethic is love. If I ever fail to write from this ethic, then I cannot and should not write. This is not to say that I will avoid hard conversations or be lax in my convictions. I believe that true love doesn’t stand idle while it’s object of affection lives or thinks in ways that ultimately lead to despair or destruction. But the motive and spirit in which words are written, matters. The difficulty in writing is communicating the heartfelt concern in your eyes and the tone of your voice. So I will do my best. I ask that you do the same.

Thank you and I look forward to the conversation!