Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday: Daytime Services and Luncheons Daytime Holy Week Services, Monday (April 2), Tuesday (April 3) and Wednesday (April 4) will take place 12:00… Read More »Please join us for Holy Week and Easter on the Hill. . .
March 4, 2012 Rev. Fritz Ritsch, D. Min., Preacher St. Stephen Presbyterian Church Fort Worth, TX Six St. Stephen members and I dared… Read More »The Next Church and the Others–Mark 8: 31-38
2 Kings 2: 1-12
Mark 9: 2-9
Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher
When I started as pastor of a small church some time ago, I wanted to kick off with an officer’s retreat that dealt with some of the issues that the congregation had left over from when the previous pastor left. I had a conversation with the Christian educator, who’d been there several years and was quite sharp. He explained to me that people were extremely angry and felt betrayed that the previous pastor had left them. We agreed that a Biblical look at betrayal and abandonment would be a good start.Read More »Don’t Leave–Transfiguration Sunday
This is the timeline we’ll be using in The Northminster Sunday School Class, Sunday, Feb. 20, when we’re discussing Bonhoeffer’s attempt at Church-Based Resistance.Read More »Timeline: Bonhoeffer and Church-Based Attempts to Resist Hitler, 1933-39
by Mark Scott, Music Minister
The Lenten season extends over a forty-six day period beginning Ash Wednesday and ending on Saturday evening prior to Easter Day. However, the six Sundays in Lent are not actually a part of Lent (thus they are styled Sundays IN Lent rather than Sundays OF Lent) making the actual number of days in Lent 40. The date of Ash Wednesday is determined by the date of Easter. This year, Ash Wednesday is February 22.Read More »Ash Wednesday: the beginning of Lent
Former PC(USA) moderator and prolific blogger Bruce Reyes-Chow has started a petition drive called “There is more than one version of Christianity!” His point is that there is a great deal of diversity the Christian family. Christians need to be more tolerant of one another and the media and culture need to recognize Christian diversity, too.Read More »Big Tent?
Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher
February 12, 2012
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Our friend Sharon Curry, who went in December to serve as a missionary in the South Sudan, had to be evacuated almost as soon as she arrived because of ethnic violence. She has been frustrated by this, obviously—not only because she has been interrupted in the mission work she intended to do, but even more because she’s been in her placement in Akobo just long enough to get to know people. Now she is in a major city, Malakal, far from the fighting, hearing second-hand how overwhelmed her friend the local doctor is, and how all the families she’d just gotten to know are experiencing deaths and hiding in the forest, afraid to go to the hospital for fear that they’ll be killed by guerilla fighters.Read More »Secret Agenda: Mark 1: 40-45
The Second “NEXT Church” Conference will be held at First Pres, Dallas, February 27-28. As the PCUSA experiences change generated both from within and… Read More »“NEXT” Church Con in Dallas Explores the Future of the PCUSA–You Should Go!
Our unofficial church historian, Cathy Corder, has unearthed some fascinating documents from the early days of St. Stephen. Most interesting are those that detail the process our predecessor church, Broadway Presbyterian, went through in deciding to move from its location across from present Broadway Baptist to this site.Read More »“The Lord is Trying to Do Something Grand Through Us…Therefore We, God’s Servants, Arise and Build”
By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
January 15, 2012
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
The Saturday Evening Post recently ran a story that checked up on another story they published over 100 years ago: an article written in December of 1900 predicting what will happen in the 20th Century. The old article got a lot of predictions right. It predicted that the average American would be 1 to 2 inches taller. It predicted digital photography: “Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China, a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.” It even predicted wireless technology. All in all, pretty amazing.Read More »Calling–1 Samuel 3: 1-10; John 1: 43-57
