Scott's Thoughts

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(Slightly Belated) Merry Christmas—Thanks for Being on Team FCC!
Whenever I reflect on God’s kindness for the privilege of serving such a wonderful church like First Christian Church, I think of Paul’s words in Philippians 1: “I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, … because of your partnership in the gospel” (vv 3-5). So, at the end of another year of gospel partnership, on behalf of our Elders and Staff, thank you for being on Team FCC—for your faithful service, care for one another, generosity, and witness to our community. It is exciting to be in gospel partnership for the sake of “Helping People Find and Follow Jesus” in our community and world (Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 16:15-16; Luke 24:47-48; John 20:21; Acts 1:8). Please pray for God to use our efforts for His glory in 2026!

Christmas Giving Project—It’s Not Too Late
There’s plenty more about this below, and at this link, but, long story short, our work in Colombia is emerging to become a fairly significant project and it could use some more financial help for the late January 2026 trip. (At least 2-3 I know of are late additions who don’t have funds to go on their own and they haven’t had much time to raise funds the normal ways (i.e., sending out letters.) Every gift directly supports:

• sending and equipping mission teams who share Christ and train believers.
• buying Bibles and discipleship materials for new believers.
• strengthening a young church committed to preaching Jesus where too few have heard.

Find out more info and give online at this link.

2025 Annual Report Video
In case you missed it or would like a refresher as to what happened in 2025, don’t miss the Annual Report Video, available at fccgreene.org/2025annualreport or on the app at “Watch” > “Media” > scroll down to the generic FCC logo, or well, here:

Let’s Make 2026 the Year We Reclaim Inviting People to Church
I’ve asked our Campus Pastors, and Guest and Creative Teams, to be “on it” this year with producing and pushing Invite Cards because they’re an important regular reminder that we do not exist for ourselves but for the lost. So that if you don’t have one handy—in your wallet or purse—please grab an Invite Card on your way out and pray for opportunities to invite someone to join us next Sunday. If even only a few dozen of us took one Invite Card per week and walked out of the church service praying for an opportunity to use it, I bet our eyes would be opened to one, and we’d see significantly more people finding and follow Jesus! ;o) And speaking of the significance of a simple invite, don’t miss this recent H7 Story about how one changed someone’s life!

Pray for our Pillar Young Adults and Longview Live Bold Interns at CrossCon
This week, Thu-Sat, Jan 1-3, about 30 young adults and a few too-old-for-this folks like my wife and me will be at a missions-focused conference in Louisville, KY. Please pray that gospel-centered relationship and mission would be the result!

Join Us for 7 Days of Prayer, Sun-Sat, Jan 4-10, 7-7:45p, Greeneville Campus
Speaking of 2026, during the first full week of every year, we set aside 7 nights to focus on praying for the upcoming year through the lens of our church vision, in this case, our 7 Team Code Maxims. Our Residents will lead us through a short devotional thought followed by a time of corporate prayer. Come join us, to help set our hearts and minds aright for a new year! For more info, see here.

January = Re-Upping Month
Speaking of 2026, part 3: You’ll hear plenty about this during the next 4-5 weeks, but I wanted to give you a heads up that January is our annual Membership Renewal and Spiritual Health Survey, where we take down our official membership list down to zero and ask everyone to recommit to meaningful participation here at First Christian Church. Also, regardless of membership status, we ask everyone to fill out a Spiritual Health Survey. This Membership Renewal and Spiritual Health Survey is an important chance for us, as a body, to recommit to God’s work among us for a new year. Which of our 7 Habits needs renewed focus? Are you needing to engage in worship more faithfully? … to begin to serve on the team? … to connect in a small/Life Group? Maybe you’ve never really biblically committed to a local church and know you need to identify with Christ’s people (Acts 9:4-5; 1 Corinthians 12:12-13; 12:27; Ephesians 1:22-23; Romans 12:4-5; Colossians 1:18; Acts 2:41-47; Hebrews 3:14)? The 7-Habits-based questions are as varied as our individual needs. Our prayer is that, as a body, we would “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,” renewing our shared commitments so that “the whole body… builds itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:15-16; Hebrews 10:24-25; cf. Colossians 2:18-19). For more info and to renew membership and/or take the Spiritual Health Survey, go to fccgreene.org/renewal (or fccgreene.org/survey, both work.)

Re|engage Begins Jan 19
If you’re married, and you’ve never done Re|engage, well… now’s the time, y’all! It’s a super helpful marriage enrichment curriculum that can help refocus your relationship on Christ. Details here.

About 2 years ago a thought occurred to me that was something along these lines: ‘Y’know, we should make it part of our campus launching strategy that every time we launch a new campus, we plant a church abroad.’ At the time it just kinda seemed like a good idea, but here we are pursuing exactly that! (By the way, no one should think me some prophetic soothsayer, as if I have a direct line to God. It’s just called catching up to the Great Commission.)

So over the last 6-8 months—in Pulse Videos, H7 Stories, Scott’s Thoughts, at the Vision Bash, and from Campus Pastors in worship services—we’ve been telling you about expanding opportunities in our relationship with a church plant in Bogota, Colombia we’re helping support. Over the course of the last couple years, we’ve sent 4 teams of Elders, Staff, youth, young adults, and adult FCCers to lead camps for kids, encourage the believers, and help train church leaders. Just to name a few of the ways we’ve begun helping the church plant there: they’ve been working through their church’s Confession of Faith using ours as a template; they’re using some of our Kids curriculum; we’ve taught our “In Awe of Your Words” Bible study and teaching workshop there; we’ve had a few ministry mentoring meetings via Zoom; we’re helping facilitate him beginning classes with Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary (as part of our Church Partnership with CBTS); and one of our Campus Pastors is now meeting weekly with Pastor Diego!

They’ve already informally launched, have about 35-40 in attendance, already have a church building (though they’re in search of a more centrally located one), and are working toward official incorporation. While there’s much more to tell—make sure to go here to learn a little more—I’m excited to let you know that the Elders have decided to fund about 75% of their immediate needs starting in January 2026. That ~$13,000 per year will go toward enabling Pastor Diego to be full-time and will pay for the bulk of the church’s ongoing ministry needs. We think it’s a really cool opportunity to do some front-lines missions help. So please pray for Diego and Angelica Camargo (and their two children) and the Bogota church plant called “La Barca” (for “the boat”), that God would use their faithfulness in living, teaching, and proclaiming the gospel to advance His Kingdom and glory! Stay tuned for more info…

In the freedom Christ has won, the New Testament calls us to “serve one another through love” (Galatians 5:13), to “bear one another’s burdens” in fulfillment of the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2), and therefore to “do good to everyone” (Galatians 6:10). But Scripture also warns us not to practice righteousness “before other people in order to be seen by them,” calling us instead to quiet generosity that seeks God’s approval rather than public recognition (Matthew 6:1-4). Frankly, such things like this are always going on, but, as I think is best, we don’t often report on them.

So, in the interest of letting you know that the body at FCC is a generous people, here’s a list of just a few things that I know about that we’ve recently done in the last few months to help care for our church family, local community, and wider world. (All the following are off-budget unless otherwise noted.)

• $78,350 given to Multisite Fund.
• $6,250 given to help fund Colombia mission trips in Nov 2025 and Jan 2026.
• $1,200 from Benevolence Fund (from the FCC budget) for groceries, auto repair, and medical bills.
• $1,000 to help pay for others’ FCC conference/event fees.
• $700 of FCC budget money to fund 4-5 young men’s participation in a preaching conference.
• $500 of both FCC budget and non-budgeted money to help 6-7 young people attend a Bible teaching workshop.
• $300 of FCC budget money to help young new students apply to seminary.
• $600 donated to help fund our Elders & Staff Christmas Dinner.
• $150 of FCC budget money to pay for students fees to an event.
• Three cars donated, both inside and outside of FCC.
• RV Repairs, food and groceries for a traveling family (both on and off budget).
• At least 6 car repairs, paid by a combination of FCCers, FCC budget, and multiple repair shops giving discounts &/or absorbing the cost.
• Numerous instances of Life Groups helping people inside and outside of FCC with furniture, groceries, financial help, event fees, and regular old fun.
• A Life Group and others from FCC made over 200 meals and delivered them on Christmas Eve to needy families.
• A Life Group winterized a trailer for a family who hadn’t had heat or air in years.
• One Life Group has a “God Can” where they collect funds and disburse them a couple/few times a year.
• Some re:gen leaders collected funds to help someone.
• A few folks on one of our Serve Teams pulled together to help a fellow member who was struggling with groceries.
• A few dozen FCCers gave to the Hope Center at their recent banquet.
• A couple dozen FCCers gave to YoungLife at their recent banquet.

Again, frankly, such things are going on all the time and don’t get much press, which is as it should be (Matthew 6:1-4). But, as I get to have a rare front seat to such things on the regular, I wanted to give you a peek into how God’s grace is extended in practice by our people.

Speaking of recent non-budgeted and largely untouted generosity, here are the local nonprofits and ministries to which Catalyst Coffee has recently donated, over the course of October through December—$1,000 each:

• Exodus 14 Ministries – locally founded and operated residential recovery ministry
• ALPS Adult Day Care Services – locally founded and operated nonprofit
• Hope Center – locally founded and operated pro-life pregnancy resource center
• Colombia Church Plant – Our Catalyst Coffee General Manager Nathan Dickerson is going on the Jan 2026 trip to personally deliver this donation to the church plant we’re helping, which is super cool! They have some interest in starting a coffee shop so he may also have a consultant role—also super cool!

Leadership Thoughts

• A leader is someone who is well aware of the thorns and thistles, works beyond their hindrances to the point of personal sacrifice and fruitfulness, and leads others to do the same.
• I know I’ve said something like this in 17 different ways over the years, but it continues to strike me: Everybody wants growth, unity, and peace without sacrifice. But that’s just plain not how life works.
• We need to trust that God is using the grind of our everyday boring faith to become the ground of long-term mature and fruitful faith, in us and others.
• Part of why the special revelation of God’s Word matters for us day to day is that we make a basic category mistake when we judge God’s eternal character from our limited circumstances.

Our Daughters Need Good-Boy/Bad-Boy Filters
A quick little parental commiseration-slash-help, if you need it, to help build into our daughters a strong and Godly filter for boy decisions.

One of our more strong-willed children—feels like all of them, actually—has suddenly discovered the opposite sex and was pretty strongly rebuffed by yours truly in her efforts to pursue a boy. (Don’t worry, she’ll never read any of this.) After receiving what these days seems like an exceedingly rare mea culpa—though I’ve learned to overvalue the rare win—I wrote a version of what follows.


Overkill? As usual—yes. Too many words? Again—for sure. And am I a fool for triple-checking my texts like this to my kids hoping they’ll someday keep them and refer back to them?! Most likely. But nonetheless an important thought for how we train our daughters to have filters for Godly young men.

Where Animal Sacrifices and Human Hearts Fall Short, Jesus Stands Holy
This week, while reading Alec Motyer’s A Christian’s Pocket Guide to Loving the Old Testament, I was reminded of how perfectly Christ fulfills—in every conceivably germane detail—what the Old Testament sacrifices could only foreshadow. Those sacrifices were never meant to save in themselves; they were God-given pictures pointing us to Christ. What they could only depict symbolically, Jesus accomplished personally, willingly, and finally, right down to our greatest redemptive need—to the level of desire, the human heart and will. Motyer says:


Wow—think of the glory of the gospel here displayed. Where animal sacrifices could only picture substitution, Jesus is the fully human, completely obedient, and final substitute who perfectly aligned with the Father’s will where we do not. Our deepest problem isn’t merely that we sin, but that our hearts and wills are bent against God; and in Christ, God supplies the perfectly obedient human will we do not have. It’s almost as if—one might say—God had already thought through how to deal decisively with our failure, and all that remains is for us to do nothing but trust Him.

“Obedience Precedes Understanding”
Had this thought while preparing for the sermon on Matthew 2:1-12 and considering how the wise men followed the star without knowing, well, much of anything about why before they began following. I wish I could say it didn’t take me more than 50 years to see this so clearly, but I’m shaken at how simple and profound this is, especially given how profound my intellectual pride must be to keep me so blind. To be fair, I suspect my blindness is because we live in a world that is constantly deceiving and discipling us toward the selfishness of fullness of understanding before trust and obedience. But in Christ, it’s exactly the opposite—obedience precedes (at least fullness of) understanding. It’s why fear of God is the beginning of knowledge (see this 3-min video teaching for more.) It’s what Augustine called “faith seeking understanding.” I’ve been seeing this in glimpses—like flickering ballast that hinted at light—but it became full-fledged sight for me in the Gentile Magi who followed the star before knowing exactly who it was leading to. If we’ll just pay attention to the Scriptures, everything we need to know for life and Godliness is there for the taking (2 Peter 1:3).

Affirming the Bible’s Authority in Theory Alone is to Deny its Sufficiency in Practice
For many self-professed Christians, the Bible is the most believed-in and least read-from book. If the Bible is basically only good for communicating that Jesus is Lord and He came to save you from your sins, and you don’t learn much more truth about the world, and how to actually live, be a Christian, lead a church, etc., then you’re like the overwhelming majority of Christians—you basically don’t read it much. It is one thing to believe it is authoritative—you can do that from afar, with little to no actual effect on one’s life. It’s another to treat God’s Word as actually sufficient for truth and life.

A Cute and Clever Take Doth Not Godly Advice Make
I’m amazed—and über annoyed—at how many Christians quickly accept a cute or clever take on something without so much as a glancing thought to whether it’s actually true or biblical. For too many Christians, there’s no substantive difference between their emotions, sociocultural commitments, relational devotion, and biblical interpretive grid. That’s not kindness nor love but ruinous empathy—it’s acting as if God’s character and nature don’t actually define what is true, good, and helpful.

The Nature of Hell: Annihilationism/Conditional Immortality or Eternal Conscious Torment? A Few Preliminary Principles to Guide Our Thinking
Kirk Cameron has perhaps recently come out as an “Annihilationist,” or perhaps more accurately, he holds to “Conditional Immortality” (CI) when it comes to “the fate of the wicked,” a common way to refer to those condemned to hell. In basic terms, conditional immortality holds that the wicked will ultimately be destroyed and cease to exist rather than suffer in “eternal conscious punishment,” the more traditional, historic view of hell.

While I’m working on a larger GQA (fccgreene.org/gqa) on the issue—ugh!—I wanted to throw out just a few initial bullet-point thoughts to keep in mind before jumping into the fray. Nothing exhaustive here—just some initial guardrails:

• While many Bible-believing Christians have a kneejerk reaction that conditional immortality is wrong—and I agree—the question of the nature of hell is a thornier doctrine to nail down than should be assumed. It’s not as easy as ‘I’ll list my verses, you list your verses, and if you don’t agree you’re a heretic.’
• The doctrine of hell must be built from the full sweep of Scripture, giving priority to the clearest and most extensive didactic passages rather than isolating individual words, metaphors, or prooftexts. (Actually, this is Hermeneutics 101 and should be understood and applied all the time, but it is sadly rare in such discussions.)
• Historical theology is not authoritative nor infallible, but a doctrine held broadly and consistently across centuries of orthodox Christianity carries real interpretive weight and should not be set aside lightly.
• That a doctrine is unpopular or emotionally difficult does not make it unbiblical; Scripture is revelation from God that often confronts our moral intuitions rather than confirming them.
• Too often people approach hell with unwarranted and unbiblical assumptions. (And below, at times that will be obvious, I’m clearly revealing where I am on this question.) For example:
  • Hell is an arbitrary torture chamber, (rather than God’s just response to unrepentant evil.)
  • “Destruction” or “death” must mean non-existence, (rather than ruin, loss, or a state of ongoing deprivation of life’s good.)
  • Eternal punishment is unjust because sins are committed in time, (ignoring the infinite holiness and worthy of the God against whom sins are committed.)
  • Divine love and justice are competing attributes such that affirming eternal judgment somehow diminishes God’s goodness.
  • Annihilation would be a more merciful or morally superior outcome, (despite Scripture consistently framing judgment in penal rather than annihilative terms.)
  • Emotional recoil should function as a hermeneutical control over clear biblical teaching, (treating discomfort as a signal that the text must be wrong rather than that we might be).