A "Shouldless" Life

A “Shouldless” Life

Well, if you’re a pastor I hope you got your Easter sermon ready for Sunday.  And it better be a good one! I mean, your sermons can be mediocre throughout the year, but you better nail it this Sunday! That’s what you should do!   Letting Go of the “Shoulds” It is really easy to…

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Autism and the Church

Autism and the Church

In this guest article, Dr. David J. Quel shares about his experience raising three Autistic boys.  Not only has David been in pastoral ministry for over twenty-five years, he also has a Doctorate in Marriage and Family Counseling and a Master’s degree in Autism Studies.   Over the last twenty-one years, I have had the…

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The Paradox of Suffering

The Paradox of Suffering

Someone said to me recently after church, “Protestants don’t really have a good theology of suffering.” And I think this person is right.  In Protestant circles, we tend to focus more on things like: “Victory in Jesus!” “Just believe and it will be yours!” “All things work together for the good of those who love…

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The Exile of the Church

The Exile of the Church

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of exile as a way of understanding the challenge of church leadership today.  It’s a helpful way of thinking about the church’s place in the world right now, especially in Western culture.   What is exile? The truth is, most of us in the West are…

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Is Equilibrium a Precursor to Death

Is Equilibrium a Precursor to Death?

Have you ever felt frustrated when circumstances changed?  Maybe it was vacation plans.  Maybe work plans.  Maybe family circumstance changed.  Whatever it was, you planned for things to be this way, but now they’re that way. When things don’t go as planned, that might put us in a state of what we might call disequilibrium. …

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Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone

Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone

Sometimes you gotta step out of your comfort zone. I don’t know about you, but I much prefer to stay in my comfort zone. It’s way easier inside my comfort zone. I know how things work inside my comfort zone. I know what to expect inside my comfort zone. I mean, I just feel comfortable…

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Call Me Mr. Arrogant

Call Me “Mr. Arrogant”

You can just call me Mr. Arrogant.  Or Captain Cocky.  Ooh, or how about Pastor Proud! Yep, there’s a lot of arrogance in me. “But, wait, Markus.  Didn’t you tell us in your last blog post that you struggled with feeling like you weren’t enough?” I did.  And here’s the crazy part.  Arrogance is really…

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Am I Enough

Am I Enough?

Am I enough?  Nope. At least that’s how I often feel.  And I have lived with this feeling of being “not enough” for most of my life. As a kid, I always felt like I was on the outside looking in.  I felt like I wasn’t cool enough, or athletic enough, or smart enough, or…

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Logos 9 Bible Study Software Review

Logos 9 Bible Study Software Review

Logos 9 Bible study software offers some really great features and improvements over Logos 8.  But the short of it is this:  Logos 9 helps you craft really great sermons! I’m going to keep this short, so I’m just going to share with you two of my favorite features. (Click HERE if you want to…

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The End of Us vs. Them

The End of “Us” vs. “Them”

“Us” vs. “Them.”  It’s how most people see the world.  Another word for this is tribalism.  And, apparently, tribalism comes quite naturally to us.  Here’s what a study titled Tribalism Is Human Nature says: Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that…

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Tempered Resilience Book Review

Tempered Resilience Book Review

Tempered Resilience, by Tod Bolsinger, helps leaders step into the challenge of adaptive change with health, strength, and confidence. In Canoeing the Mountains, Bolsinger showed pastors, leaders, and churches what to do in order to lead adaptively in uncharted times.  In Tempered Resilience, he shows us how to be and become the kind of person…

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What is Pre-Christendom?

What is Pre-Christendom?

What is Pre-Christendom? Pre-Christendom is the era of Christianity lasting from the time of Jesus until 312 C.E. when the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Christian. It is called Pre-Christendom because it preceded the Christendom era, the years when Christianity was at the center of Western culture. In the years following the life of Jesus,…

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Lament for 2020, Police and Protestor pray together

A Lament for 2020

A Year of Suffering I’m a white male.  What that means is that I’m a person for whom neither the color of my skin nor my gender have ever been an obstacle.  I’ve had other obstacles, but not those. And so there’s a part of me that feels unqualified to speak into the current moment. …

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Logos Bible Software Review

Logos Bible Study Software Review

[All Logos 9 packages are currently on sale for 15% off. Click HERE to get the discount.  And read my review of Logos 9 HERE.]   It happened! I had been looking at the Logos Bible study software website when it happened.  I stumbled across the Logos endorsements page and I saw something that made…

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Shalom in the Age of COVID-19

Shalom in the Age of COVID-19

The Age of COVID-19 The world is broken and in desperate need of shalom. If you’ve never noticed it before, I bet you’ve noticed it in the age of COVID-19. COVID-19 is running rampant in our world. At the time that I’m writing this, there are over a million confirmed cases and over 53,000 deaths.…

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A New Heart

Much has been said and written (including by me!) about the ways churches need to change in order to be the church we are called to be in the world as it is today.  Over the past several decades, we’ve used all kinds of adjectives to describe what the church should be like: Missional Attractional…

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How Do Churches Change?

How does change happen? How do organizations and institutions change? How do churches change? The world has changed dramatically—and churches have noticed! There’s no getting around it. The way we’ve done ministry in the past—strategic planning leading to lots of felt-needs-based programming—doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. Something has to change. Exactly what needs to…

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Thingification

I love the church I’ve heard it said that the church is the hope of the world—and I agree! The church is the Body of Christ and the Light of the World. I firmly believe that it is through the church – God’s people – that He will bring healing and redemption to the brokenness of…

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Really Listening Really Matters

I’m going to start this post off with a bad joke…  Ready? My wife yelled at me today saying, “You weren’t even listening just now, were you?”  I thought to myself, “Man, what a weird way to start a conversation…” For some people, listening is hard, isn’t it?  We get caught up in our own thoughts…

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A Way Which is Full of Promise

Like many of you, I turned on the news this past week and saw the reports… Another school shooting. This time in Parkdale, Florida. I couldn’t bear to watch for more than a minute… Another tragedy. More death. More shattered lives. It’s times like these that our emotions can run rampant… grief, fear, anger… These…

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Drop the Agenda

Most of the time it’s good to have a plan.  If you’re starting a church, or beginning an exercise program, or moving into a new career you should probably have a plan.  You should know how much it’s going to cost, how long it will take, who will help you accomplish it, and what the…

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A Process for Discerning God’s Call

Vocational Connection Groups—which I began to discuss in this post and in this post—can be the key that unlocks a church’s ability to discern how God is calling them to engage their community.  I call them Vocational Connection Groups because they involve three activities: Living out our vocations.  In other words, as God’s people, we…

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New

As we enter the New Year we recognize a few things: 2017 Was A Tough Year No doubt, there was a lot of good that happened in 2017.  But there was also a lot of tragedy. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Jose destroyed hundreds of homes and shattered countless lives while wildfires ravaged both Northern and…

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A Sacred Dance

Let me start by saying that the video below is a moving and powerful expression of God’s love for us lived out through the vocations of his children.  I urge you to watch the video below and share it with your friends and family.  You can find out more about the video HERE. That being…

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God’s People Are Out There

When I was a pastor, one of the greatest challenges was to try to figure out how to bring Jesus into our communities.  We would talk about that a lot—in our staff meetings, in our elder meetings, in our deacons meetings.  I would talk about it from the pulpit.  I would write e-mails about it. …

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Finding Christ in the Situation

We’ve seen in this post and this post that God has been at work in the world ahead of his people throughout the scriptures.  He was ahead of Joseph (Genesis 37-50), ahead of Daniel (Daniel 4:10-17), ahead of Peter (Acts 10:19-48), and ahead of all the apostles (Acts 11:19-30). If we see examples of God at work ahead…

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God Is Up To Something

The “previousness” of God, which I wrote about HERE, refers to the idea that God is already at work in the world before his people even get there.  It refers to the fact that God doesn’t need to wait for us—God can begin his work well before we have even realized what God is up…

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The previousness of God

The Previousness of God

I’m a big believer in the sovereignty of God.  What does “sovereignty” mean?  It essentially means that God can and will do as God chooses. ​I know that raises a lot of questions.  Questions about the existence of evil and why God doesn’t always prevent catastrophes.  And what about free will?  If God is sovereign,…

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Vocation As Discipleship

How do people grow in their faith?  Well, the question I really want to ask is, what kinds of things do churches do to help people grow in their faith?  Here are a few things we did in my church: Held worship services Sang worship songs Had small groups Asked people to usher and serve…

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Ministry Wherever

The unique way in which we live out our calling is what we call our vocation.  I used to think of vocation as nothing more than a job.  When I was in high school, I had friends who would go to a place called “Vo-Tech” in the afternoons, which stood for “Vocational Technology.”  There they…

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Living Into Both Callings

One of the greatest challenges for the church today is the re-integration of the sacred and the secular.  Too many people live with the false belief that their Monday through Saturday lives are less important to God than their life on Sunday—especially Sunday morning.  Too many people think that only pastors and missionaries and worship…

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