Author: Fr. Barnabas Powell

Fr. Barnabas is the parish priest at Sts. Raphael, Nicholas, and Irene Greek Orthodox Church in Cumming, Georgia. He is also host of Faith Encouraged Live on Ancient Faith Radio and author of the Faith Encouraged podcast.

He Who Endures

· Fr. Barnabas Powell
William Barclay once said, “Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.” Of course, we’ve heard this most of our lives. We have to stick with it. We can’t give up. We give up just when the breakthrough is coming. And all the other inspirational quotes we can muster to teach each other to keep trying; don’t give up. But sometimes, that misses…

Knowing When It’s Time to Go

· Fr. Barnabas Powell
Sometimes you just gotta cut your losses! But how do you do that, especially when emotions are involved? And especially when you don’t know yourself well enough to see the end of your personal talents and gifts in a given situation! It seems I was at a very familiar place in my life. Being someone who loves to help and loves to be seen as a benefit in someone else’s life, I…

Love Is A Choice to Obey

· Fr. Barnabas Powell
At the risk of really dating myself with this movie reference, I remember the movie “Love Story” and the famous line from the film “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Hey, it was the early 70s and we were just coming out of the tumultuous 60s. We needed a bit of saccharine sweetness! But does love really mean never having to say you’re sorry? Really? Is our understanding of authentic love really…

The Parish As Steward – A Special Lecture

· Fr. Barnabas Powell
How (and why!) do we transform our communities from being inward-focused to outward facing? In our keynote address, Fr. Barnabas Powell of Sts. Raphael, Nicholas, and Irene GOC of Cumming, GA (http://stsrni.org) and Faith Encouraged Ministries (http://faithencouraged.org) challenge the parish leadership of the communities within the Metropolis of Pittsburgh to look to the needs of our local communities and people, who thirst for the “Church of the Living God, the Pillar and…

What You Loves Shapes Who You Are – Sunday Homily

· Fr. Barnabas Powell
On All Saints Sunday, we find ourselves in an increasingly “enchanted” world. If we are ever going recover the centrality of Christ in our lives, we are going to have to avoid the temptations to idolatry in worshiping false gods, it is going to be by loving God with all our hearts, souls, and minds. Learning to love God more than anything else is the most important purpose of your life. https://youtu.be/kh6pNAzx24s

God’s Grace Is Inexhaustible

· Fr. Barnabas Powell
“As Your grace cannot be fathomed, so Your mercy cannot be measured…” With these words, I invited this very precious person to confess her sins. We were at confession and this was the very first time she had ever done this before. And even though she had grown up in the Orthodox Church her whole life, she had never been to confession. She thought she was worthless. She thought all her bad…

Have You Been “Saved?”

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“Have you been saved?” The sincere lady was looking intently at me and waiting for my answer to her probing question. You see, she was “witnessing” to me in hopes I would be “saved.” Most of us have either experienced this sort of question or know someone who has been asked this at one time or another. And, in my old way of Faith, I would have proudly answered “Yes, I’m saved.”…

The True God Changes Everything

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The truth is you will never develop or mature beyond your idea of who and what God is. The old gods of the pagans were little more than really powerful humans, and it seemed the whole point of worshiping these gods was to get them to “like” you so they would either leave you alone or give you a prize! All those ideas crumbled when the Christian Faith upended the pagan world.…

I Reckon

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“Well, I Suwannee!” I remember saying that when I was in seminary in Boston, and the reaction from folks not from the South was, let’s just say, interesting. “What does THAT mean?” was the common question. I confess I took pleasure in pouring on the Southernisms in Boston to the point that one, sincere, young man asked me if there was a book he could buy that had all this information in…

A Jew Inwardly

· Fr. Barnabas Powell
“That’s the real McCoy!” I know, some of you younger readers will stare at the screen and say “What?” But believe it or not, that is a famous American idiom that has an interesting origin. In fact, there are several stories about how the phrase “The Real McCoy” came about. The top two origin stories are both interesting. The first story refers to an American inventor named Elijah McCoy. In 1872, Elijah…