“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.” Mother Teresa So today I want to close out this short series I’ve been doing talking about the changes that we as a church are doing in missions. I know that there a lot of great churches that are already doing great work, but I’m so impressed with these new wholistic initiatives I wanted to share them with as many church leaders... Read more

“The world is incomplete from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular. Seek the view from manywheres.” -Richard Shweder Two years ago, a few Christians and I were having a Bible study with a Muslim man from Sierra Leone.  When we got to one of the exorcisms in the Gospel of Mark, I told him that none of us at the table had ever... Read more

“There will be no peace among civilizations without peace among the religions; there will be no peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.” Hans Kung If you live in America, or really any Western country, there’s a good chance you feel like the world around you is becoming less and less religious. And in a way you are right, Western countries do have a growing number of people who are not self-identifying with any of the world’s major... Read more

This is another post in a Friday series about both the nuts and bolts of practical ministry and how it relates to the reason we got into ministry in the first place. I’ve asked my friend Randy Piersall to write for the next couple of weeks, about best practices that he’s seen from ministers in funerals. Randy is a local funeral home director and one of the best people that I’ve seen at entering into people’s grief and standing with them. He’s shared tips on... Read more

Did you know that for the first few centuries, Christianity was not primarily a “Western religion”? A strong case could be made that Christianity actually started off as an Eastern faith. However today the places where Christianity actually began are now overwhelmingly non-Christian. Today 90% of Christians live in a country where they are the majority religion. But 10% of the world’s Christians live as a minority, often an extreme minority. Today if you look at a map of the world to see where... Read more

So one of the things that I’m most proud of at the church I serve is our Restore the World initiative. We believe that in the age to come, God is going to restore all things, and the call of God is to partner with Him in what that looks like here and now. I’ve been blown away by the way our entire church has been engaged in the process of thinking and praying about what God is doing globally,... Read more

So today I want to finish the review I’ve been doing the past week on Andy Crouch’s excellent little book “Strong and Weak” If you are in any kind of leadership position, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. And if you have a certain allergy to leadership books, than trust me, this is just the book for you. Because this is not your average leadership book. This is not a book about realizing your true potential or cracking the leadership... Read more

The first time I ever spoke in front of an actual crowd it was for a funeral I was doing.  One of the members of the 10 person church I was growing up at had died….and it was obviously a big deal for us. We’d just lost 10% of the church. So I stood up in front of a couple of hundred people and talked about Bro. Frank and how much he meant to us, and about death and resurrection... Read more

So this is a blog series trying to summarize Andy Crouch’s excellent little book on Jesus-shaped leadership called “Strong and Weak” Crouch’s idea is that to be like Jesus we are called to bear both authority and vulnerability, but that because this is so hard to do, we often neglect one or both, without realizing how much it costs us, and those that we are trying to lead. Crouch explains all this with a simple 2×2 grid, and today I want... Read more