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Brothers and sisters,

Here we are at the end of 2025 and it has been a busy year here at the church! Each year presents its own challenges and opportunities, so I wanted to go over some of the highlights of 2025 here at Hope Valley.

This year, our church reached out to our community in so many different ways, seeking to fulfill the commandment given to us by Christ to love our neighbors as ourselves. We held our annual Souper Bowl of Caring this year, raising money for both Urban Ministries of Durham and Hurricane Helene Relief. We also held our annual ACC Tournament Food Drive benefitting the Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC (FBCENC) and collecting 669 pounds of food! We collected school supplies and clothes for the children over at Parkwood Elementary School. Most recently, we quickly began a food drive in response to the cutting of SNAP benefits during the government shutdown — that collection is ongoing, by the way!

But, we did not just collect things here at the church! During Operation Inasmuch, our church reached out in a variety of ways: putting together “Thinking of You” bags for church members and care packages for people struggling here in Durham, doing yard work around the church, and sending our kids to Carolina Reserve to sing for the residents there. We’ve also had a regular group of volunteers going to the FBCENC every month to help there. And, of course, we partnered with Scarlette Jasper once again to send Christmas boxes to our brothers and sisters in rural Appalachia who are struggling right now.

The year was not just about missions, however. We also had big, community-focused events here at the church. We hosted our Easter Egg Hunt and let local kids know about the resurrection. We had another summer of Super Saturday Adventures, where children learned about a God who loves them very deeply. Our Fall Festival was a hit once again this year, with local children and families having the chance to come and be joyful together

And we’ve had all kinds of special events within our church family, including baptisms and deacon ordinations. We remembered and celebrated the lives of people we’ve lost on All Saints Sunday. We hosted Andy Hale from CBFNC. We finally went to the North Carolina Museum of Art — just three years after I said we’d go! And, of course, we’re coming off another season of Advent with beautiful services like the Hanging of the Greens, the “Peace on Earth” musical service, and the Christmas Eve service.

It has been a wonderful year here at Hope Valley Baptist Church! I’m looking forward to all God has in store for us in 2026!

Happy New Year,
Pastor Ben

Brothers and sisters,

There are a lot of different ways to tell that it’s Christmastime right now. The decorations in people’s yards. The endless ads telling me how many shopping days are left till Christmas. The fact that Mix 101.5 is nothing but Christmas music right now. But for me, one of the main ways I am constantly reminded it’s nearly Christmas is my Instagram feed.
For those that may not know, Instagram is a social media app that runs based on an algorithm. Basically, I “follow” different accounts on the app to see their posts. Instagram’s algorithm then monitors which accounts I follow and which posts I click on to suggest new accounts for me to follow and new posts to click on. I follow several different cooking accounts on Instagram and all those accounts are putting out holiday/Christmas recipes right now. Their stuff looks good, so I click on their posts and watch the whole vid-eo they’ve posted. That then tells the algorithm that I like that content, meaning I obviously want to see more of it.

Long story short, my Instagram feed is buried in thirty to sixty second videos of Christmas recipes right now, particularly Christmas cookie recipes. One account is showing off the five different recipes they made to make their “Christmas cookie box.” Another account is showing how they recreated their great grandfather’s bakery out of gingerbread. Yet another account shows how they made “log cookies” that are made of two different doughs swirled together, then sliced, and individually cut to look like log slices, before being baked and packaged to look like a bundle of firewood.

Now, baking has always seemed like magic to me. I can bake, but only if there is a recipe and only if I follow it exactly. But in watching all these different accounts, all these different posts, all these different cookies, I noticed something. For the most part, the basic ingredients stay the same—flour, butter, sugar. And a lot of the basic techniques are the same—dry ingredients to one side, wet ingredients to the other, cooling doughs once mixed. It isn’t until midway through the recipe that you begin to see how each cookie is uniquely its own or how each baker adds their unique personality to it. They start with the basics, build a strong foundation, and allow their creativity to flourish.

In that way, these Christmas cookies re-mind me of the faith of individual Christians. We all agree on the same basic tenets—Jesus Christ is the son of God; our sins are forgiven when we place our faith in him, etc. And a lot of broader ways we express our faith are the same—serving our community through volun-teer work; talking with others about our own faith, etc. But as we grow more and more into our faith, we learn how to express ourselves in ways that are more consistent with the gifts God has given to us. Some folks are called to be musicians. Some folks are called to not only volunteer with organizations but lead them and create opportunities for others. Some folks are called to teach others about the faith. It’s not magic, but it is amazing what God can do with us when we affirm those basic beliefs, build a strong foundation, and focus our creativity on honoring God.

Merry Christmas,
Pastor Ben

Brothers and sisters,

Back in 2019, while I was the pastor at Sharon Baptist Church in Smithfield, I preached a series of sermons that used Christmas carols as points of emphasis. It was very similar to our “Faith and Art” series, but with carols instead of art pieces. On the Sunday of Peace, I wanted to focus on the idea that the things God desires are different from the things people desire. In particular, I wanted to focus on the second verse of one of my favorite carols (as printed in the 1991 Baptist Hymnal) and the righteous indignation of the carol’s author. With that in mind, here’s what I wrote back then:

Now, the carol I wanted to take a little closer look at today is our final hymn this morning, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. I have always loved this particular hymn. As a child, it was mostly because I liked the tune — it is so different from the sound of most Christmas carols. As I got a little older I started to like it more because of the presence of the angels. Now as an adult, I love it because of the fact that while this carol is certainly more melancholy than most of the others we’ll sing over the next few weeks, the writer, Edmund H. Sears, never gives up hope. He dreams of a world, as he says, “When peace shall over all the earth Its ancient splendors fling,/And the whole world give back the song Which now the angels sing.” Sears was a pastor all the way back in 1849 and while his exact inspiration is not known, most folks seem to think he wrote this carol in response to the many wars raging in Europe and in response to the end of the Mexican-American War. And so I love the kind of resilient hope that comes from the second verse. In the first verse the pastor establishes that the song the angels are singing is “Peace on the earth, good will to men.” Not only that, but the song comes from “heav’n’s all-gracious King.” And so in the second verse he writes, “Yet with the woes of sin and strife The world has suffered long,/Beneath the angel strain have rolled Two thou-sand years of wrong;/And man, at war with man, hears not The love song which they bring:/O hush the noise, ye men of strife, And hear the angels sing!” Sears believed deeply that the war, the violence, the strife that was afflicting his world was not God’s intention. In this carol, the angels sing God’s message of peace and good will, and Sears is confident that one day the world will sing along with the angels. But at the moment, it seemed to him that people would rather continue on with their sinful ways. They’d rather drown out the music of heaven, with the noise of worldly power. And so I love that line, “O hush the noise, ye men of strife, And hear the angels sing!”

So many things in our world clamor for our attention. So many of those things claim that they can offer us hope, peace, joy, and love, but only if we’re willing to ignore the truth — that the angels have been singing a song of peace over the world for thousands of years, but we’ve allowed ourselves to listen to “men of strife” instead. This Advent, I’d encourage you to push back on the things that cause you strife and hear the angels sing, “Peace on the earth, good will to men.”

Grace and peace,
Pastor Ben