PBPC Announcements

PBPC Family, Simone Weil, in an essay, " Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God " (thanks to Shane Caldwell for the recommendation) writes,  "Attention, which directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer."  To pray is to give our full, pure, sustained attention to God. She goes on to say, "The quality  of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer." The more that we can give our full attention to God, the more we enter into the mystery that is prayer. But this attention is not gained through muscular effort or force of will. The more that we try to pay attention, the more we actually fail to truly pay attention. Weil defines attention as "suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object." This attending to God is more about making space, emptying ourselves so that there is space for our minds to be filled with God. I have a long way to go to...

PBPC Family, The first chapter in Richard Foster's book Prayer   is "Simple Prayer" and, in his words, "is the most common form of prayer in the Bible." In Simple Prayer, we "bring ourselves before God just as we are, warts and all." This is much easier said than done. There is a temptation that we need to clean ourselves up before we come to God in prayer. We need to pray with the right motives, say the right words, or focus on others more than ourselves because that's what God would want. We bring our idealized selves to God - who we wish we are or who we think God wants us to be. The problem is that we're not actually bringing our true selves to God - our broken, messy, selfish, complicated selves. We're bringing a fabricated, dressed up version of ourselves. And God doesn't love that fabricated self because it's not real. God loves us - period. God loves us in our sin. God loves us in our brokenness. God loves us in our greed an...

PBPC Family, As I shared last week, one of the priorities Session set for this year was to foster a deeper Kingdom mindset and lean into deeper participation with other churches. It is a sad reality that churches often compete with one another for congregants. We are delighted when a new person begins attending our church and we don't pay much mind if they transferred to us from another congregation. In our attempts to grow our own churches, we can easily forget that God's kingdom is bigger than our congregation. In an effort to resist that competitive mindset and to grow in love for other churches, we will pray for local congregations during our time of prayer on Sunday. We will try to pray with specificity, lifting up what is going on in their life and praying God's blessing to be with them. If you know of happenings at local churches or have a specific congregation in mind that you'd like us to pray for, please reach out to me at pastor@pbpc.org  and I will be sure t...

PBPC Family, At our annual meeting two weeks ago, we shared 6 priorities that Session had set for 2025. I want to share each of those with you and give a short explanation of each one.  Generational Handoff As our kids are getting older, how are we passing on the faith to them? In much of the research that's been done on the decline of churches in North America, one persistent finding has been the failure to hand off the faith to the next generation. We are blessed by our children and also want to give them a solid foundation and understanding of the Christian faith. Kingdom Mindset  + Partnership We are not the only church in Oakland. As some pastor friends of mine often say, we want to see churches in Oakland move from competition to collaboration. We want to expand our awareness of other churches and the ways we can work together in loving and serving our neighborhood, Oakland, and the world. Conversations about our Future In finding a new tenant, we now have a (mostly) balanced...