A Brief History of Love-Not-Fear

The page began when I was teaching a youth Sunday school class. We'd often get into deep discussions, and we'd often run out of time, or we'd need to do some more research to help us form our thoughts better. I thought that having a site like this would help. I also thought it would be less intimidating (and more practical) for young people to point their friends at a website instead of inviting them to worship. The website they could visit when they wanted, and spend as much time as they wanted there, while worship is only at a specific time in a specific place.

Well, that didn't work out as I had planned. I then re-purposed this page to be a kind of "news and information" page because our church website at the time was very static and difficult to update. That didn't work very well either, mostly because, as it turns out, there wasn't that much news to report.

My church used to ask me to preach about once or twice a year when our pastor was on vacation or study leave. I started posting those sermons on this page, and also started adding shorted posts with thoughts and ideas I had now and then. (That's something like what this page will be, at least until it looks like I should change it again...)

When we began what is now called "Awake and Alive," a weekly very informal gathering of disciples with no agenda but lots of ambition, this page became an outreach of that ministry, and Abby and Tom from that group were given posting privileges. We posted when we changed the meeting place, for example. The last post before this reboot was several years ago when we decided on the name "Awake and Alive" after a song by Skilllet.

So, now this is something else again. I've removed older posts that were not consistent with this current focus, and changed the look and feel of the page.

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