About us

Ready for takeoff! — On a layover in 2020, Mary and I were the only ones staying on the plane for the next flight… so the pilot offered to take our picture in the cockpit. Rare opportunity to ride up front!

Welcome!

Hi! We’re Tom and Mary Benton. We’d like to welcome you to our blog site and invite you to join us. Our hope and vision is for BentonBlog to be a community and a resource built from our shepherding and teaching ministry.

We’ve been married for over 38 years, and during that time we’ve worked through marriage issues, raised two faithful children, and helped many couples with their marriages and parenting through informal counseling and workshops.

We currently serve as elder and elder’s wife in the Hampton Roads Church of Christ. We were appointed to these roles during the coronavirus pandemic at one of our congregation’s first online streamed services on March 29, 2020. Since then, we’ve been serving in various ways with the other elders/wives, the Walkers and Woodhams, on issues confronting the congregation, and with the lead evangelist/women’s ministry leader of the Hampton Road Church, the Antons, and with the evangelist/women’s ministry leader of the Greater Chesapeake Region, the Millets.

Before moving to the Hampton Roads area, we served as a shepherding couple for the Youth and Family ministry in the Montgomery County Church of Christ (renamed the Capital Rivers Church of Christ in early 2020) in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., after serving as elder and elder’s wife in that congregation from 2011 to 2017. We moved to the DC area in 1998 after living in the Boston area, where we were members and served in various roles in the Boston Church of Christ from 1983 to 1998.

About BentonBlog

We initially started this blog with this goal: to write and publish family devos that help parents of Middle School and High School teens. There are many resources for family devos focused on younger children, but not enough for the teen age group. We asked the teen parents in the church to help – some of their devos are available on the site now. We welcome more – contact us for help.

We’ve also provided other resources on marriage and parenting, along with general posts on other topics to help disciples of Jesus grow spiritually. We’ll continue to post notes from lessons, including communion messages, lessons for devotionals and on spiritual issues and subjects of interest. We see BentonBlog as a place to build up the saints along with developing our teaching ministry.

BentonBlog Content

The site currently contains a Bible Studies menu item with three lesson series: on parenting (from a lesson for the Garcia’s Bible Talk in the summer of 2018), on knowing God’s will (based on a lesson Tom did recently based on our decision to move) and on resolving conflict (from a singles lesson a few years ago).

We also added a Resources menu item with posts addressing the 2020 issues of the COVID-19 pandemic and Injustice. Check out ways to grow during quarantine, work from home, be a great mom or dad and other resources to help you through the pandemic. Also you’ll find links for articles, movies, videos and books as “resources for empathy, understanding, and compassion”.

During the pandemic, Tom started a men’s devotional group to read the Scriptures, talk about them then pray. This evolved into what we now call a “haverim”, which is based on a teaching method used at some synagogues. Tom developed a number of resources to help others start haverim groups, and the Hampton Roads church adopted the approach with a reading plan through the whole New Testament for 2021.

Recent Restart

In 2021, Tom experienced some medical issues early in the year and took the year off from blogging, except to edit the ResilieNT New Testament Reading Plan blogposts for the Hampton Roads Church. Mary completed her second and third classes toward a Master of Theology degree with the Rocky Mountain School of Ministry and Theology.

In late 2021, Tom resumed blogging with a series on Jesus’ “I am” statements based on a sermon he preached in December. In 2022, Tom continued blogging with resources to help with the Hampton Roads church Old Testament Reading Plan and a series on Daily Disciplines.