King-Hall Family Blog

By day 2, our team was starting to get comfortable and rely on each other.  We started our day at the church with praise and worship, and bible study, this time looking at Deborah's example in Judges. The cycle of behavior of the Israelites in Judges was to take baby steps away from God's direction, only to look up and see that they had wandered away into sin and idolatry time after time, resulting in oppression by the very people groups they cavorted with. They would inevitably cry out in remorse and repentance, and God would raise up an anti-hero used by God to rescue and restore his people. Deborah led for twenty years before God used her for His rescue, but she showed a servant's heart that wasn't afraid to walk alongside her people, and still challenged them to rise to be their best.  The theme of God's rescue really struck me, and I kept coming back to it throughout the weekend. Even now I know there is something more there to be unpacked in my own life.  Conc

I am still unpacking in my heart and in my mind the long weekend trip I had with seven of the Concord Baptist Church youth and other adult leaders, serving and learning and worshiping together in Knoxville, Tennessee. I told Joe that every opportunity to be an adult in the room with a group of our kids feels like a gift and a little treasure. I definitely felt that this weekend, but there was something refreshing in it just for me as well. Our church has partnered with Washington Pike  church in Knoxville for the last several years. The city as a whole seems to be revitalizing, but it is still rife with people with problems. Somehow I can relate to that! Over the last several years a new staff has been called to a tired old church (and church building) to bring in new life. The neighborhood itself is a tangle of old made new, problems and revitalization, and the old church building is a picture of that. In the old sanctuary there is fresh carpet, fresh seating, fresh paint, fresh techn

In the days leading up to Independence Day, on the heels of Juneteenth and our trip to England, I have been more thoughtful this year.  My formative memories took place in Germany, where I grew up an Army brat in the 80s. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” was a much bigger deal in my world than the Challenger explosion. Army green, yellow ribbons, and red, white and blue colored my world, and I would run around with my brother and the other Army brats until the streetlights came on. In every literal way my dad kept me safe. And at an American church in Nuremberg, Germany I attended VBS and first learned that yes, Jesus loves me; Jesus loves the little children of the world.  I don’t know that there is anything that I would change about my childhood (although adolescent angst seems universal no matter how idyllic the circumstances). I was an innocent, and probably charmed. I was well traveled by the time I hit my teens; I had an Army dad, a devoted mom, and an American passport. (I

Pastor Clint (we started calling him dad) made us take a 3 hour walking tour of church history before we got to explore London, but we did actually learn a lot…  St. Paul’s Cathedral, initially constructed during Roman occupation in the 700s, and for years the center of the Roman Catholic Church in England.  St. Paul’s “cross” or the outdoor pulpit - scriptures hadn’t been translated into English from Latin, and priests only knew enough Latin to mumble through the liturgy. There was little education or accountability, and the Roman Catholic Church controlled daily life because they commanded spiritual training and the hope of heaven. Christians who advocated for the translation of the Bible into English were persecuted and in some cases executed, because it threatened church control. However, by the end of King Henry VIII’s life, he had broken from the Roman Catholic Church (so he could divorce and remarry his 6 wives) and English translation Bibles were allowed in all churches.  After