A Season of Gratitude

This year my husband Tom and I are celebrating Thanksgiving twice. At the beginning of October we had the privilege of sharing Canadian Thanksgiving with friends in British Columbia. We loved not just the enjoyment of rich food and fellowship but also the times of reflecting on the many blessings in our lives. We came home with a warm glow. …

Faithfully Pragmatic in Church Planting

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – good advice from Winston Churchill Looking at the results and making decisions based on how it affects those results is called being pragmatic. It is a process of dealing with things sensibly, realistically, based on practical considerations as opposed to theoretical ones. So should we be pragmatic about church planting? This tends …

Free Webinar: Fund Your Church Plant

We here at V3 are excited to partner with Tom Mauriello and Reliant to offer this free webinar on Creative Ways to Fund Your Church Plant. Missional churches and church planting present unique challenges and opportunities with their funding needs.  Does your fundraising model align with the mission?  We’ll explore the methods and models we can approach funding and fund …

Post-Christendom Gathering

In a previous post I discussed a guaranteed method to reduce workloads for overwhelmed pastors and church planters: reduce the number of monthly worship services. In this edition, I ask a related question: do worship services have expiry dates? Or does what we have now work great?   In terms of expiration, high church liturgies don’t update or shift much at …

Holding Space in the Midst of Tragedy: A Hard Story PART 2

We jump back into the question of holding space and self-care without sacrificing the ethos of the pastoral office. As pastors we help shoulder the burden of trauma carried by members of our community. The cost of this work can be overwhelming. Yet, to do this work well we must take care of ourselves without feeling the guilt of our …

Sent Shepherds

Is it possible that shepherds with apostolic eyes can help create bridges from predictable and safe sheep pens into missional and open fields? In missional movements growing out of evangelical subcultures it is really important for apostles and prophets to regain their voices in the body which have been lost, quieted or silenced(!) in the overemphasis on shepherds and teachers. …

Feeling Like an Evangelistic Failure?

Do you feel like a failure if you haven’t converted anyone? This was the question that my friend asked me about my work in the neighborhood where I live. My friend who is not a Christian, had read my book Urban Spirituality: Embodying God’s Mission in the Neighborhood. In this book, I write about the work I do in my …