Josh Vires

I have this hat that my dad brought back to me from a business trip to Atlanta when I was 9 or 10 years old. You can see that I’ve worn it a lot. In fact, I wore it to just about everywhere I went during the summer when I was a kid. Church camps, grandparents’ house,...

Several years ago, there was story shared about a woman from Connecticut whose power had gone out during a storm. She left her house to go to a local hardware store to purchase some flashlights, but the store was closed. She returned home and found what she thought...

I attended the New Day Conference in Murfreesboro, Tennessee at the end of last week with a small group from Riverchase. It was a good conference and I left encouraged about the opportunities we have to fulfill the call of Christ to make disciples. On Friday evening,...

You Are What You Eat You’ve heard the phrase, “You are what you eat.” Simply defined, it means that you should eat healthy if you want to be healthy. This phrase can trace its roots back to the early 1800’s. It came from the 1826 work The Physiology of Taste, in which...

Above the piano in our house is a large wood sign with the phrase, “it is well with my soul” on it. Kimberly and I purchased it during a season of our life together where we were not completely sure what the future had in store for our little family. Since then, the...

I would like to share with you an excerpt from a poem written by Ann Weems. The beginning of it describes a four-year-old child that brought with her a balloon to church one Sunday. When her Sunday school teacher saw the balloon, she mockingly said to the girl, “We...

When my grandmother, who we called Granny, passed away several years ago, my mom and her siblings asked me to speak at her funeral. My mom had shared Granny’s Bible with me, so I began looking through it for any thoughts she had written down or notes that might shine...

I’m not much of an optimist. I’m not really a pessimist either. I consider myself more of a realist. Rather than seeing my cup as half empty or half full, I just see an 8 ounce cup that has about 4 ounces left in it. I think one of the mistakes we can make is...

A study commissioned in 2017 by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy a few years back suggested that seven percent of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from chocolate/brown cows. If you do the math, that works out to 16.4 million misinformed,...

We were discussing King Uzziah last week in the Homebuilders’ class. 2 Chronicles 26 tells us King Uzziah was appointed king when he was only 16 years old and that he “sought the Lord” (vs. 5) for a period following his appointment. However, he eventually became...

One of my goals in the first few months of being here is to connect with those who are involved with organizing or leading our various projects, events, and ministries. I have been able to visit with several of you already. It has been a blessing to learn more about...

This is a question I have been asked more than once since we’ve arrived here. I am going to have an opportunity to present to the congregation the vision I have for this work later, but for now, I do want to share a brief description. At its core, involvement ministry...