It’s Holy week and Jesus journey towards the cross has begun. Many of us have already processed around the church on Palm Sunday. We have already bought our Easter eggs and hot cross buns, diverting our attention from the real meaning of Easter to its commercialized version. How many of us are sucked in? The Most Subversive Week of Jesus …
You Don't Have to Preach Every Sunday. Try This Instead.
I love everything about preaching—planning sermons, studying and research, Sunday delivery, feeling spent on Sunday evening—all of it. I’d love to do it every Sunday, but I believe that it’s not best for me to do so. It’s also not the best thing for our church community Austin Mustard Seed. As I have written before, we believe that our liturgy …
Announcing a Church Planting Conference for Missional-Incarnational Practitioners
For the last few years Dan White Jr, others and I have been part of a national initiative concerned with one goal: helping church planters recover the essentials for cultivating communities of disciples who are sent deep into their cities to embody the Gospel of the Kingdom. It seems fairly simple, but it is not. Culturally, we are swimming in …
How to Be Missional Like St. Patrick
St. Patrick’s day is upon us. Whether you are are a green-beer drinking Irish Catholic or an abstaining evangelical, the person and legend of Patrick is essential study for every missional leader. The First Missionary In his masterful history of the Celtic Church, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill makes the bold claim that Patrick was the first true …
Free Webinar: Discipleship Q & A with Tim Catchim!
So many people are working hard at “ministry,” but they aren’t necessarily doing discipleship. Clearly, this wasn’t what Jesus had in mind. Register now for this free Q &A with Tim Catchim on Thursday, March 19, and be ready to ask him ANYTHING!
Ministry at the Cost of Discipleship
As I talk with various church leaders, I am discovering a common misunderstanding about the difference between ministry and disciple making. Describing the difference between disciple making and ministry is kind of like describing the difference between a square and a rectangle. A square can be a rectangle, but a rectangle is not necessarily a square. They both have four …
Does the Church Trust Women?
Sunday was International Women’s Day, a day to celebrate the achievements of women around the world while calling for greater equality. It is not a day that many churches seem to highlight, but I think it raises the question: how well do we do with gender equality in our congregations? A couple of days ago, I was chatting with a friend …
How Crisis Reveals Your Spiritual Gifts
While some family friends were visiting us from Florida, they were awakened by a flurry of text messages and e-mail alerts to some startling news. The building that housed their worship center and an array of community services was collapsing due to a water main leak. The news immediately included the awareness that the building had been unoccupied, and there …
Jesus Told a Joke. Did You Miss It?
Have you ever tried to retell a funny story or joke, only to have it fall flat as a pancake the second time around? When you add two thousand years between the telling, this is especially likely to happen. The parables of Jesus come from a distant time, an unfamiliar place, a completely different culture than the ones in which …