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Hadley Baker of Rowlett | Premarital Counseling Is Not About the Wedding

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The average couple spends more hours choosing a caterer than talking about money. This is not a joke about weddings. It is a description of how most people prepare for a marriage. Hadley Baker of Rowlett, Texas , northeast of Dallas, officiates weddings at City On A Hill Community Church and elsewhere, and the ceremony is the smallest part of what he does with a couple. The four subjects that surface everything else Money, family of origin, conflict, and expectations about children. Almost every serious argument a married couple will have traces back to one of those four. Couples arrive expecting to talk about their relationship. They end up talking about their parents’ marriages, because that is where most of their assumptions came from and neither of them has examined them out loud. Money is where this shows up fastest. One person grew up in a house where money was discussed openly and the other grew up in a house where it was a secret, and they are about to open a joint account. Nei...
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Hadley Baker of Rowlett | The Sermon Test Nobody Applies Until Thursday

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Most sermons are forgotten by Tuesday. Not because the preaching was bad, and not because the people in the room were distracted. They get forgotten because nothing in them asked anybody to do something different on Monday morning. Hadley Baker of Rowlett, Texas , northeast of Dallas, builds his week around that problem. As lead pastor of City On A Hill Community Church, he writes with a specific question running underneath the draft: what does a person do with this before the week is out? A sermon that only works on Sunday did not work There is a kind of preaching that lands beautifully in the room and evaporates in the parking lot. It moves people. The construction is careful and the delivery is warm, and nothing in it makes a demand on anybody’s Tuesday afternoon. Baker treats that as a failure, not a near miss. If a passage cannot be carried into an ordinary week, the problem is usually not the passage. The fix is rarely more application at the end. A sermon with three practical bu...
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