The Simpleton Blog

Good morning church, it is so good to be with you all. My name is JJ and I’m the lead pastor over at Center Church. We are your closest sister church in the Zero Collective. As I’m sure you guys are starting to get familiar - Zero Collective is a network of churches sold out on the mission of making sure zero lives are unchanged by Jesus, and for a long time there have been four sister churches. Frontline is the biggest sister - over on plainfield, then Story with Pastor Kyle

Today I want to start by telling you the story of Wangari Maathai. Wangari is from Kenya, and she might be one of the most impressive people I’ve read about in a long time. She was a very influential and important person in Kenya back in the 70’s and 80’s. She had a big pile of degrees from all sorts of international schools - Nairobi, Germany, she got her PhD in 1971. Later she ended up getting elected to Kenya’s National Assembly, was the leader of the National Council of

Today we are continuing our series called “All Hands on Deck” - and we’re going to tell the story of a guy who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in only 52 days, but he did it with 41 different work crews, and all of them had the same mentality: the job gets done, when everyone owns a piece. So let’s dive in. If you want to grab your bible, we are going to be in Nehemiah, chapter 2 and 3, but we’ll start in chapter 2. And while you’re looking that up, I want to give you a bit o

[You can watch the whole message HERE, or just keep reading!] What does it mean to be faithful? I feel like the answer to that is always couched in the negative. Don’t cheat. Don’t wander. Don’t drift. But what does it actually look like in our life? Like, I know what it is not - but what IS it? What does it look like to be proactively faithful? What IS faithfulness? Some of you know this - I was on vacation two weeks ago. My parents have a little place on a lake a couple hou

[You can watch the full message HERE, otherwise keep reading!] I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up - I did not pay a lot of attention to Christian denominations. I grew up methodist, but that didn’t really mean anything to me - that was just the name on the side of the building we always went to. In my town, there were other types of churches - Lutheran and Baptist and whatnot, but I pretty much had no idea the details. It’s funny - the CRC church, Christian Ref

You can WATCH the full sermon HERE , otherwise keep reading! Boy, it is good to be back. You know we’ve been going through this series on the ten commandments - and this week we’re talking about sabbath. Now some of you might not know, i haven’t been here very much over the last few weeks. I was in Texas, and then I was in Chicago, then I was over in Waterford for my dad’s retirement and then I had a wedding out in Frankenmuth. Even last week - I was here, not preaching but

[You can WATCH the full message HERE, otherwise keep reading!] How do you get God to say “yes” to your prayers? Is there a negotiation tactic that works? Is there a posture, if you pray on your knees is it more likely he’ll say yes? If I dress nicer - does God lean in to hear me? Is there a certain amount of good deeds I need to do - how do I get God to say “yes”? What’s the formula I need to punch into the vending machine to get my blessing to drop? You know when I was a kid

Why would a slave go back to their abusive master? Why do women stay with husbands who treat them like dirt? Why do we stay in jobs where we are miserable and underappreciated? Why do people sometimes move backwards? When I think about the civil war, and the emancipation proclamation - all those slaves suddenly were free men. In my head they’re standing in a field, maybe they’ve got a hoe or a rake or something, and a man rides by calling out “you’re free!” and in a moment th

Are We Living In The End Times? Matthew 24 I wonder how many of you are waiting until we get bombed. I wonder how many of you think this war in the middle east is fulfilling prophecies from the bible. I wonder how many of you think the financial markets are two shades away from collapse. I wonder how many of you are waiting (or maybe even HOPING) for a housing collapse? How many of you are worried about governments or tech companies getting more and more powerful, taking away

Have you ever made the mistake of telling your children about vacation? It’s Mother’s day and so this felt appropriate - mom’s, you ever have littles and you make the mistake of saying the nice thing out loud? Because kids don’t hear a plan. They don’t hear a commitment, right? This is why we parents spell the word ice cream, right? Because you can’t say that word out loud without them losing their minds. I’m talking to my wife, hey - maybe tonight after soccer practice, we c

1 Corinthians 6:9-20 Don’t answer this question out loud. How did you learn about sex? Think back to it - how did you find out about that stuff? Ope, pay attention to the vibe shift that just happened in the room, because we’re going to come back to that. Over the years, I’ve met a lot of people with a lot of different experiences. I have friends whose parents sat them down for an awkward but complete conversation. I have other friends whose parents just pretended that stuff

How do you decide if you’re going to trust something? How do you decide what to believe these days? I remember there was a news story a few years ago where a lawyer used ChatGPT to write his legal brief. The problem is, these were the early days and people didn’t know how it worked. Chat GPT MADE UP citations - like the brief referenced previous court cases that set precedent, but they weren’t real court cases - those cases did not exist! [picture of lawyer new story] And the

The Lie of Control - 03.29.2026 Ecclesiastes 9 I want to start this morning with a question - Do you feel like you are in control of your life? I think I go through seasons, personally, where sometimes I feel like I’ve got a really good grip on the steering wheel, and then other seasons when life has got me hog tied in the trunk and I have no idea where we are going. And - have you noticed this? - I find my anxiety, my stress in life is often tied to how in control I feel. Th

Today I want to start with the story of Angus McGillivray. It’s a phenomenal true story, that comes from a soldier’s account of life in a World War II Japanese prison camp. The book is called Through The Valley Of the Kwai, and the soldier who wrote it was Ernest Gordon. You see, Angus was a Scottish prisoner in one of the prison camps that was filled with Americans, Australians and Britons who had all helped build the famous Bridge of the River Kwai. But the massive prisoner

You know, when I was a kid - some of you already know this - I grew as a pastor’s kid, and our whole life revolved around the church. And I want to be clear - I loved the church. I know some people have had really rough experiences with the church, but every church I have been a part of has been a wonderful family of God. The little old ladies who ran Sunday school - they were like extra grandmas. The youth leaders were like aunts and uncles to us - my church friends were pra

Why do we build sand castles when we go to the beach? Why do we build snowmen that we know won’t last? For that matter - why do we do laundry in a never ending cycle and why do I bother cleaning my house while my children still live in it? These are the real questions that keep me up at night. I fell down a rabbit hole on the internet last week because I knew that sand castle, and sand sculpture competitions exist and I got curious - what do they do at the end? When my kids m

Have you ever read a story in the bible and thought - wait a minute, I’ve seen a TV show just like this? Well - maybe that’s just for bible nerds - but back in 2010 CBS aired a brand new show that ended up being WILDLY popular and it sounded an awful lot like the scripture we’re going to get into today. When it came out this show was the most popular new show in any genre that year - it premiered to 38.6 million viewers and to this day that premiere is the highest rated and m

When I was a kid, there was this adorable disney pixar movie that came out called Monster Inc. - it was such a fun, novel idea. We enter the world of monsters who are all a little bit cute, and they have this elaborate system of creating doors into kid’s bedrooms to scare them, because screams are electricity for monsters. And when I was little, in the movie a kid gets loose in the monster world and causes all kinds of havoc. Fast forward ten years - I am a grown adult, marri

How do you define what is good? How do you know when something is right or wrong? By what standard do you draw the boundaries of morality in your life? [And for some of you here today - by the end of this I may have an invitation for you to an entirely new standard] . I started reading this book recently called Dominion: how the Christian revolution remade the world, written by an atheist/agonistic historian named Tom Holland. Well - he was an atheist when he started. In fac

Now I know that it’s January - it’s a new year, and so I’m sure that none of you are wasting your life watching stupid videos on the internet. You’re better than that, I can feel it - you’re people with purpose, people with drive. But not this guy - I love those dumb videos. That algorithm has got me pegged - they know exactly what I want to watch. You can ask the staff, or my poor wife - the amount of times I whip out my phone like, “hang on, I have a cool video I want to sh