It’s time to get ready for Christmas. Decorations, trees, lights and gifts are prominently displayed in the stores encouraging us to buy early and be ready for the consumer frenzy to follow. So how do we keep our focus on what really matters during this season? Here are some practices I have found helpful. 1. Find Your Centre I start preparing in …
Too many of us know how frustrating and even hurtful it can be to love Jesus’ church but not fit in any local church. Anyone who questions the elevated role of the Sunday service has felt the isolation. In light of this, The Church as Movement is more than the practical guidebook it sets out to be; it’s the resounding reminder …
We’re in the season of Advent: the beginning of the Christian year and a time of waiting, longing, preparation, and expectation. In the midst of a culture that wants to rush toward the warm fuzzies of a sentimentalized Christmas season, how can we cultivate the kind of attitude Advent is meant to evoke in us? How can we honor what this …
When it comes to discipleship, most of our churches follow the methods and ways of traditional learning. We teach classes, launch programs, or go through sermon series to cover an area of discipleship. While information is a part of the process of discipleship, it is incomplete as a whole to help us learn and practice the ways of Jesus. Discipleship …
Most people commonly think of Jesus as a person who helps set people free, but what we don’t think about as naturally is the fact that Jesus Himself was free. We think of Jesus as someone who frees people, but not Jesus as a free person. Jesus enters into the world not only to lead humanity into freedom, he enters …
I love practitioner credibility. I love it when people who have actually done what they purport needs doing are able to share, from experience, in intelligible, compelling, and digestible ways, guidance about to lead. In The Church as Movement, JR Woodward and Dan White Jr. bring practitioner credibility in spades. Leaders of one of the most fruitful church planting movements in …
When I first was captured by the idea of missional church, I started by coordinating service projects. Mostly because I didn’t know what I was doing. My imagination had been captured by a bigger vision for what life, faith, and ministry could be, but I didn’t know how to get started moving in that direction. Telling People to Live on Mission My wife …
Dip your toe in. Cold shivers up your leg, all the way to your shoulders. Excitement and fear flood over you as you stand in line. As you wait, you think of all the reasons why you should get out of line: It’s chilly. I might flop. They may laugh. There is a slight breeze. Yet, you stay in line. …
I’ve been a pastor for 10 years, and I’ve never been a very good one.In seminary, I remember learning about how pastors are gifted at listening, and pastoral care, and counseling. That didn’t really sound like me.And then there was all of this energy and attention given to preaching—“pastor,” as it is in many Christian circles, was synonymous with “preacher.” …
I’m still not sure how I became a church planter. Seriously, my gifts and talents don’t seem to make me a likely candidate. I wasn’t picked early as having “church planting potential.” I don’t have that serial entrepreneur thing that a lot of planters do (although I did start a punk rock band in high school and we were actually kind …