Munholland Methodist Church

06/02/2026

William Ury spent decades at Harvard studying what happens when people hit a hard no. In his book Getting Past No, he describes the instinct that takes over the moment someone blocks your path — you push harder, make your case again, find another angle. It almost never works. What Ury discovered is that the most effective thing you can do when you hit a wall is go to the balcony. Step off the floor. Walk up above the room. Look down at the whole picture from a higher vantage point. From up there, you can see what nobody on the floor can see — because they're all too close to it.

That image landed differently the first time I read it in Acts 16. Paul has a plan — Asia Minor. It is not a bad plan. It is experienced, strategic, reasonable. And the Spirit of Jesus stops him cold. No explanation. Just a wall. Paul turns north toward Bithynia. Another wall. So he ends up in Troas, which was not on anyone's itinerary, staring at a closed door with no obvious next move. The text calls the Spirit who blocked him the Spirit of Jesus — a phrase Luke almost never uses. It signals something: this was not a minor course correction. Jesus was personally on the balcony, seeing two continents when Paul could only see two provinces. The closed door was not a verdict. It was navigation.

Most people who have stood in front of a closed door have asked some version of the same question — what did I do wrong? Why wasn't I enough? It is a reasonable question on the floor. But God isn't on the floor. He is on the balcony, holding a picture larger than anything you are working from. The door that closed was not a sentence. It was a comma. The sentence isn't finished yet. Think about the door that has been closed in your life — the one you've been standing in front of, trying to figure out what went wrong. Is it possible that door closed because God can already see the one that's about to open?

The closed door leads to an open door.

What closed door in your life might actually be God steering you — not stopping you?

Blessings,

Jonathan

05/30/2026

There is a gap that runs through the middle of a lot of sincere Christian lives, and most people cannot name it. They believe. They are doing what they know to do. But something is missing — a living quality, an aliveness — and they do not know what to call its absence.

Paul arrived in Ephesus and found twelve disciples who fit that description exactly. Real believers. Sincere people pointed toward Jesus, doing everything they knew. And Paul asked them a question that stopped everything: Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? Not — do you believe the Spirit is real. Not — have you heard the Pentecost story. Did you receive him. The question assumes the Spirit's arrival is an event a person would know had happened. Something would have changed. You would remember it. These twelve men had not received. They didn't even know there was a Holy Spirit to receive. Paul did not file it away as an interesting theological gap and move on. He stopped, laid hands on them, prayed, and the fire fell again — same Spirit, same power, years after Jerusalem, twelve more people in a city far from where it all began.

John Wesley understood this gap well. He did not believe you could manufacture the Holy Spirit. The wind, as Jesus said, blows where it will — you cannot summon it on your own terms or produce it by willpower. But Wesley also understood that you position yourself to receive it. He called this the means of grace — the ordinary, unremarkable practices that open a person to what God is already wanting to give. Prayer. Worship. Scripture. Community. The practices themselves do not generate the wind. But they put up the sail. You can't manufacture the wind. But you can put up the sail. The Spirit does the sovereign work. Your part is to be available for it.

Bishop Carolyn Moore puts it this way: Are we willing to let Pentecost catch up with us? Not describe it. Not celebrate it once a year. Receive it. There is more — more than information about the Spirit, more than doctrine about the Spirit, more than a theology of the Spirit. There is the Spirit himself, wanting to fall on people who are willing to ask. The invitation is not complicated. Pray honestly: Spirit, I am willing to receive more than I have. Fill me. That is enough. That is what the disciples did for ten days in an upper room. They waited with open hands and the fire fell. Then do whatever he asks. The nudge toward the conversation you have been avoiding. The call to a surrender you have been negotiating around. The Spirit does not fill a closed hand. Willingness is the only door he needs open. So the question worth taking into your week: What would it look like, this week, to put up the sail?

05/28/2026

There is something quietly disorienting about the way the Holy Spirit moves in Acts. He doesn't seem to wait for the proper sequence. He doesn't hold back until all the religious requirements have been satisfied. He falls on people before anyone is ready — and the people who were most certain about how God was supposed to work end up being the ones most undone by it.

Peter was mid-sentence when it happened. He was in a place he should not have been — a Roman centurion's house, a Gentile home — still working through a vision he did not fully understand, still processing what God might be doing. No one in the room had been baptized. Peter hadn’t even finished his speech. The proper religious sequence had not completed. And the Holy Spirit fell anyway. The man at the center of that moment was named Cornelius, and Luke introduces him with a specific technical term from first-century Judaism: a God-fearer. This was a recognized category — a Gentile who had turned toward the God of Israel, who was praying and giving to the poor and genuinely seeking — but who was not inside the covenant. Not a member of the people of God by any definition available to the Jewish believers standing in that room. But reaching. He had used everything available to him to reach toward God, and he had pressed up against a ceiling he could not get through on his own.

The Jewish believers who came with Peter were not merely surprised when the Spirit fell. Luke's Greek word — existemi — means to be displaced from your standing. To have the ground move under your feet. Their entire understanding of who the Spirit was for, where the Spirit belonged, and how the Spirit moved shifted in a single unrepeatable moment. What broke their theology was not a religious insider having a deeper experience. It was an outsider's genuine reach being met with the full, uncontained presence of God before the system had processed him. God did not make Cornelius wait at the boundary until his paperwork cleared. When a human heart is genuinely seeking — reaching across every limitation it has with everything available to it — God responds. Not eventually. Right then.

The fire falls on the hungry. It does not ask for credentials first. That is not a loophole in the system. It is the point of the story. Wherever you are right now — however far outside the formal structures of faith you may feel, however incomplete your understanding, however unfinished your journey — the question that matters is not whether you have satisfied the sequence. It is whether you are reaching. Is there someone in your life who is reaching toward God right now, pressing up against a ceiling they cannot get through alone? What would it look like to be Peter in that story — the one willing to walk into an unexpected room because God said go?

05/26/2026

There is a version of the Holy Spirit that gets passed around in church culture that is mostly about comfort. The Spirit is peace. The Spirit is reassurance. The Spirit is the feeling you get when things are finally quiet inside. That version isn't wrong — but it is incomplete, and it may be quietly costing you something.

Every four years, a flame is lit in Olympia, Greece on the same hillside where the ancient games were held. It is never lit from a match or a lighter. A curved mirror catches the sun until the focused light ignites a torch. From that single flame, thousands of torchbearers carry it across continents — over mountains, across oceans, through cities and villages. Every bearer receives it from someone else. Every bearer passes it on. The flame that arrives at the opening ceremony is the same flame that left Olympia months earlier, and it has never once gone out. That is Luke's picture in the book of Acts. One fire, one source, passed from hand to hand across every century and every language. The reason this Sunday has a name — the reason we call it Pentecost — is that the fire was lit.

When the day came, the disciples had been waiting ten days. Jesus had told them to stay in Jerusalem, to wait, to do nothing yet. And then on a specific morning the waiting ended. The violent wind that filled the room was not weather. The Greek word is the same root as pneuma — the breath of God filling the space. Tongues of fire rested on each person individually. Not on the room. On each person. And then out of Galileans who had never studied another language came real, recognizable human tongues spoken to diaspora Jews who heard their own mother tongue from people who had no business knowing it. The first thing those disciples did was not sit quietly and breathe. They went outside and declared publicly and boldly in every language the crowd could hear. Luke's Greek word for their speaking means authoritative, Spirit-inspired proclamation. The Spirit's first act was not to make them feel better. He came to make them useful. The power Jesus had promised — the Greek word is dunamis, the root of dynamite — was not the power of peace. It was the power of purpose.

This matters for how you understand your own experience of the Spirit. If what you have mostly received is an internal warmth that makes hard things easier to endure, that is real and it is good. But it is not the whole picture. The same Spirit who quiets your fear is the one who sends you into places you have been avoiding, the conversation you have been postponing, the life of genuine service you have been circling from a safe distance. He did not descend with wind and fire and foreign languages so that you could feel more comfortable in your seat. He came so that you would become someone other people cannot explain. So here is the question worth sitting with: Is the Spirit primarily making you more peaceful — or more useful? And if it has mostly been one without the other, it may be worth asking whether you have received all there is to receive.

Blessings,
Jonathan

1201 Metairie Rd, Metairie, LA 70005

05/26/2026

05/26/2026

We invite you to join us for a once-in-lifetime Celebration of cherished times in the life of Munholland.

More info. to follow...

1201 Metairie Road, Metairie, LA 70005

05/22/2026

Researcher Liz Wiseman spent years studying what separates leaders who multiply the capability of the people around them from those who, however unintentionally, limit it. What she found wasn’t complicated: the best developers of people don’t simply hand out second chances. They give the right assignment, at the right level, for where a person actually is — not where the leader wishes they were, and not a diminished version of what the person failed at. The result, Wiseman found, is that people become more than anyone expected, including themselves. The leader who believes in someone before the evidence supports it is often the one who creates the evidence.

Barnabas understood this before it was studied. When he and Paul came to an irreparable disagreement over John Mark — Luke calls it a paroxysmos, a convulsion, not a polite difference of opinion (Acts 15:39) — Barnabas took Mark and sailed to Cyprus. Not back to the same assignment Mark had walked away from. Cyprus was Barnabas’s own home territory, where the first missionary journey had begun, where Mark could find his footing. And this time Mark was not a helper along for the ride. He was a partner. The deployment was equal in scope to what Paul and Silas were doing overland. Barnabas looked at Mark and saw not what he had done at Perga but what he was capable of becoming, and he gave him the full weight of the work to prove it. That decision cost Barnabas the partnership he had built with Paul. Barnabas disappears from the book of Acts after verse 39. Luke never mentions him again.

What Barnabas couldn’t have known was how the story would end. Mark became a close companion of the apostle Peter, traveling with him, trusted by him in ways that would have seemed impossible the day he left the team at Perga. Papias of Hierapolis, writing in the early second century, records that Mark served as Peter’s interpreter and preserved his eyewitness account of Jesus accurately and faithfully. The church that had watched Mark quit in Pamphylia would eventually hold in its hands a Gospel — the first one written, the foundation the others built on — that existed because one man refused to let someone else’s worst moment be their whole story. There is someone in your life who looks like less than they’re going to be. The question is whether you’ll be the one who believes it first.

What looks like less is more than enough for God.

05/20/2026

Good News!

The World Vision Race for Water last Saturday raised over $29,000!!! That means that 581 mothers and children will have clean water piped directly into their community. We had a beautiful run/walk/stroll around Audubon Park starting and ending at Sherree and Jim Funk’s house. Way to go, Munholland!!

The Young Adult Young Family ministry had a fun time with kids running around at Las Cruces last Sunday. If you have a young family, we have lots of kids for your kids to meet and play with.

Willie Santiago, founder of Cuba Connection Ministries, spoke at both services last Sunday about the incredible ministry of church growth, farming to provide food for the elderly and hospital patients, ministry to the disabled, and the profound movement of the Holy Spirit. We are proud to be partners with CCM. Through the generosity of our congregation, we have been able to provide $13,000+ for food, solar generators, and other necessary items to help our struggling brothers and sisters.

Baby Bottles were turned in last Sunday. If you still have yours, stuff it with money and bring it in this Sunday. We will get a tally of how much we were able to donate to Women’s New Life Clinic to help mothers have their babies and assist them with postnatal care.

We had a new member join Munholland at our early Sunday service. We are excited to have her a part of God’s ministry expressed through the Munholland family.

Jonathan

Jonathan

05/20/2026

Thomas Watson Sr. built IBM into one of the most dominant companies in the world. He was not known for softness. In the early years of the company, a salesman cost Watson a government bid approaching a million dollars — a deal IBM desperately needed. The rep walked into Watson’s office that day and set an envelope on the desk. Watson knew what it was before he touched it. He asked the man to sit down and walk him through what happened. The salesman did — every step, every mistake, every place where he had gone wrong. When he finished he said, “Thank you for letting me explain. I know what this deal meant to us.” He stood to leave. Watson met him at the door, looked him in the eye, handed the envelope back, and said: “Why would I accept this when I have just invested one million dollars in your education?” The salesman kept his job. Watson kept his investment. Most leaders in that situation would have accepted the resignation and moved on. The apostle Paul would have too. He understood the logic. He couldn’t see what God saw.

Two years before the events of Acts 15, a young man named John Mark had been given the kind of opportunity most people only get once. He was on the first missionary journey — traveling with Paul and Barnabas into territory the gospel had never reached. He had grown up inside the movement, in his mother Mary’s house in Jerusalem where the early church gathered, where Peter had fled after an angel walked him out of prison (Acts 12:12). He had seen things most people only heard about secondhand. And then, at a port town called Perga, the moment the journey moved from familiar ground into genuinely hostile Gentile territory, he left. Acts 13:13 records it in half a sentence: no explanation, no emergency, no dispute. He went home. When Barnabas proposed bringing Mark on the second journey, Paul said no. “Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia” (Acts 15:38). His reasoning was sound. The mission was real. You don’t risk the work on someone who has already shown you what they do when the pressure arrives.

That is a rational verdict. It is also, in this case, not the last word. God rarely lets our most reasonable assessments of people be the final one. Paul would later write from a Roman prison asking Timothy to bring Mark because he was “useful” for ministry (2 Timothy 4:11). The Greek word is euchrēstos — genuinely fit for the work. Not generous. Precise. Something had changed in the years between Perga and that prison cell. The man whose dismissal verdict Watson refused to write became the man IBM needed. The verdict Paul wrote at Perga was not the last thing God wrote about Mark.

The verdict isn’t in until God says it is.

Blessings,

Jonathan