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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
It’s so important for God’s people to be paying attention to what God is doing out in the world. In the next few posts, I’ll explain how we can discover how God is at work ahead of us by means of something I call Vocational Connection Groups. But before we dig into exactly how Vocational…
If it is true that God is already at work in the world in places where God’s people have not yet gone (you can read about that HERE, HERE, and HERE), then it’s incumbent upon us to find out where God is at work, and get involved. That’s God’s invitation to us: “I’m doing…
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…