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Advent Week 4: The Bethlehem Way, Day 4

Are you ever too quick to dismiss others' capacity to contribute or lead? How good are we at including people at VPC?

by David Joynt on December 22, 2016


INCLUSIVE

LUKE 8-12

Not only did God choose to partner at Bethlehem, He chose strangely! He picked the night shift shepherds as witnesses of the birth, and non-Jewish visitors as wise-supporters. God has a prediction for what modern parlance terms "radical inclusivity." He loves to act with and through the small and lowly, the outsider, and the unlikely ones. God sees abilities where we see deficits. He sees actors when we see observers; solutions where we see problems. 

Are you ever too quick to dismiss others' capacity to contribute or lead?
How good are we at including people at VPC?


FAMILY TIME: What kind of handicaps make life harder? Can they, and the people who have them, also be special blessings?

Tags: advent, bethlehem

About the Author
David Joynt

Dave Joynt began his service as a pastor at Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona in September 2014. This meant a move away from the Northeast, where he has a long history, growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then serving congregations in Delaware and New Jersey for a total of 23 years.

Dave was nurtured in a great church in Bethlehem where his parents, Anne and Carey, served as elders. He graduated in classics from Lehigh University where his Father taught, and then from Oxford, where he met his wife Julia. Ordained in 1988, he completed a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993.

He and Julia have a son, Tristan, and a daughter, Madeleine.

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